RE: [Caml-list] The DLL-hell of O'Caml

["Dave Berry" <Dave@kal.com>]

I don't have figures for this, unfortunately.  I believe the TIL folks
use this technique to keep the size of their type information
manageable; possibly they have some measurements.

I can offer two anecdotal examples.  Way back when the Edinburgh CS
department did all its teaching on one multi-user machine with about 8M
RAM, the Edinburgh ML implementation was quite unusable because the
top-level rapidly grew too large.  Hash-consing made it manageable, with
no appreciable loss of performance.

I believe Harlequin's implementation of Dylan also introduced
hash-consing to reduce the size of the program databases (among other
tricks).  This increased performance by reducing thrashing.

It's always hard to predict how much effect a given technique will have
in a given situation.  In practice someone would have to implement it
and measure the effect.



-----Original Message-----
From: Xavier Leroy [mailto:xavier.leroy@inria.fr]
Sent: 21 March 2002 18:13
To: Christopher Quinn
Cc: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] The DLL-hell of O'Caml


> Any idea how much improvement would come from hash-consing, 
> as Dave Berry suggested? And only that part of a module's 
> signature which pertained to actual usage would need 
> inclusion, no? And only of those modules externally provided 
> upon which one's project depends, ie. the standard library, 
> not the internal project modules?

No idea.  It's certainly possible to reduce the size of the signature
information that has to be retained; how much and at what cost, I
don't know.

- Xavier Leroy
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