Null pointers are widely known to be a lousy language feature in general, but there are certain situations where they're *really* useful for compact representation. For example, we define
newtype TMVar a = TMVar (TVar (Maybe a))
We don't, however, actually use the fact that (Maybe a) is lifted. So we could represent this much more efficiently using something like
newtype TMVar a = TMVar (TVar a)
where Nothing is represented by a distinguished "null" pointer.
While it's possible to implement this sort of thing in user code (with lots of fuss and care), it's not very nice at all. What I'd really like to be able to do is represent certain kinds of sums like this natively.
Now that we're getting BoxedRep, I think we can probably make it happen. The trick is to add a special Levity constructor representing sums of particular shapes. Specifically, we can represent a type like this if it is a possibly-nested sum which, when flattened into a single sum, consists of some number of nullary tuples and at most one Lifted or Unlifted type. Then we can have (inline) primops to convert between the BoxedRep and the sum-of-sums representations.
Anyone have thoughts on details for what the Levity constructor arguments might look like?