On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 6:04 AM, Bulat
Ziganshin
Hello staafmeister,
Friday, August 28, 2009, 3:31:13 PM, you wrote:
All the values that are computed but are also GCed (and they will be, 10^9 bytes is the mem limit). If the GC removes a value then all references in cache to those values can also be removed.
it looks like cache of values computed since the last GC, because on GC all those intermediate results will be collected. i think it's not very useful outside of fib example that does exact that - reusing recently computed values
I wouldn't be so quick to call it useless. This caching idea, when combined with HNF instead of WHNF reduction, leads to a strategy which is capable of automatically specializing away layers of interpretation. That is to say, it turns all interpreters into compilers. Now, there are some disadvantages too, some of which have to do with memory performance. But it's not clear that the disadvantages always outweigh the advantages; rather I suspect you get a strategy which implies a whole different set of trade-offs for engineering efficient programs. Luke