Dr. Lionel Parreaux's Research on Compiler Optimization Received the Distinguished Paper Award at ICFP 2024

A research paper titled “The Long Way to Deforestation: A Type Inference and Elaboration Technique for Removing Intermediate Data Structures,” co-authored by Dr. Lionel Parreaux, Assistant Professor in the Department of CSE, and his PhD student, Mr. Chen Yijia, has received the Distinguished Paper Award at ICFP 2024. This award was given to 4 out of 35 accepted papers.

About the Award-winning paper

This award recognizes Dr. Parreaux and Mr. Chen for their pioneering work in compiler optimization. Their approach addresses the critical issue of removing intermediate data structure allocations from functional programs to enhance their efficiency. It represents the first practical general-purpose approach to deforestation, which is an old problem. Although their technique is still in its early stages, it can already lead to speedups competitive with established but less general approaches, and Dr. Parreaux and Mr. Chen are confident that further refinements will yield even greater performance gains in the future. Finally, they formalized their optimization as a type and elaboration system and proved its correctness using step-indexed logical relations.

About ICFP

PACMPL (ICFP) invites submissions on the design, implementation, concepts, and applications of functional programming, including everything from practice to theory. It is recognized as one of the four top conferences in programming language research.

Mr. Chen Yijia (Left-1) and Dr. Lionel Parreaux (Left-2)