Re: [Caml-list] Can this be inlined?

[Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr>]

On 2011-01-10, at 22:22, Jacques Carette wrote:

> I am experimenting with some fairly generic traversal code (over a complex AST), but am a little scared that the result will be horribly inefficient.

Note that in your code the function oapply only adds constant overhead to some
function calls (and these are probably non-trivial functions).  So in any case
the result cannot be "horribly inefficient", since it's within a small constant
factor of the fully-inlined version.

> In any case, the real goal here is to see if I can safely adopt a coding style like this, or do I need to manually do all the inlining myself?

The question is, will you butcher your code just because you are scared of
a _potential_ performance problem, or will you write the short, readable,
bug-free code first and then see if it really becomes a bottleneck?

Even if the inlining is definitely needed, I would start by writing and
debugging the generic version, and only then optimize it (by inlining
or otherwise).

-- Damien