Re: [Caml-list] Modules and typing

[Francois Pottier <francois.pottier@inria.fr>]

Hello,

Noel Welsh wrote:

> > adopt specialized representations only,
> > duplicating polymorphic functions
> > if they have to be used at several types whose
> > representations differ
> 
> I believe MLTon does this, at the cost of no separate
> compilation.

MLton does a bit more than that, really. It specializes *all* polymorphic
code, so that, after the transformation, the program can be typed in a
monomorphic type discipline. My suggestion, on the other hand, was to
duplicate polymorphic code only on a ``per-kind'' basis; for instance, if
all product types are of kind POINTER and (unboxed) integers are of kind
INT, then a polymorphic function (say, the identity) that is used at types
(say) int * int, float * float and int would only be compiled twice. I
believe this would severely limit the ``code size explosion'' problem
that is sometimes feared when doing monomorphization.

-- 
François Pottier
Francois.Pottier@inria.fr
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~fpottier/
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