Re: one-time initialization

[John Prevost <prevost@maya.com>]

Michael Hicks <mwh@dsl.cis.upenn.edu> writes:

> I wonder if anyone knows how to optimize the following (simplified for the
> sake of dicussion) situation:

The only alternative I can think of that might provide a significant
performance boost is to make the reference a "default" value when the
initialization hasn't yet been done.  Another alternative that may win
some speed (but I sort of doubt it) is to make the reference be to a
function that raises an exception, like so:

val global = (ref (fun () -> failwith "not initialized") :
	(mytype -> unit) ref)

let init i = global := fun () -> i

let f () = ... (!global ())
let g () = (!global ()) ...

this at least has the advantage that you don't have to have a big
hairy pattern match in every function.

jmp