Learning to superoptimize programs

Understand

Code super-optimization is the task of transforming any given program to a more efficient version while preserving its input-output behaviour.

• In some sense, it is similar to the paraphrase problem from natural language processing where the intention is to change the syntax of an utterance without changing its semantics.
• Code-optimization has been the subject of years of research that has resulted in the development of rule-based transformation strategies that are used by compilers.
• More recently, however, a class of stochastic search based methods have been shown to outperform these strategies.