OPTIMIZING SYMBOL MANIPULATION LANGUAGE-BASED EXECUTABLE APPLICATIONS FOR DISTRIBUTED EXECUTION

In one embodiment, a method comprises receiving an application that describes functions according to a prescribed symbol manipulation language, the prescribed symbol manipulation language a non-Turing complete language that does not permit partial functions and describes the functions independent of any attribute of any computing system; identifying, in the application, a distribution annotation that identifies a candidate element in the application, the candidate element configured for execution in a distributed computing operation by a distributed computing system comprising two or more distributed computing devices; generating one or more variants of the application based on executing a nondestructive transformation of the application relative to prescribed equality axioms, at least one of the variants containing a corresponding semantically-equivalent variation of the candidate element; and selecting one of the variants as an optimization for execution of the application by the distributed computing system relative to prescribed metrics.