Here are papers that we have written describing parts of MLton.
Contification Using Dominators
Matthew Fluet and Stephen Weeks
International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), September
2001.
This paper describes contification, a generalization of tail-recursion
elimination that is an optimization operating on MLton's static single
assignment (SSA) intermediate language.
Flow-directed Closure Conversion for Typed
Languages
Henry Cejtin, Suresh Jagannathan, and Stephen Weeks
European Symposium on Programming (ESOP), March/April 2000.
(part of ETAPS)
This paper describes MLton's closure-conversion algorithm, which
translates from its simply-typed higher-order intermediate
language to its simply-typed first-order intermediate
language.