On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 23:44 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Dan Piponi wrote:
But every day, while coding at work (in C++), I see situations where true partial evaluation would give a big performance payoff, and yet there are so few languages that natively support it. Of course it would require part of the compiler to be present in the runtime. But by generating code in inner loops specialised to the data at hand it could easily outperform C code in a wide variety of real world code. I know there has been some research in this area, and some commercial C++ products for partial evaluation have appeared, so I'd love to see it in an easy to use Haskell form one day.
I weakly remember an article on Hawiki about that ...
Probably RuntimeCompilation (or something like that and linked from the Knuth-Morris-Pratt implementation on HaWiki) written by Andrew Bromage.
If you write
foo :: X -> Y -> Z foo x = let bar y = ... x ... y ... in bar
would this give you true partial evaluation?
No. Partial evaluation (usually) implies a heck of a lot more than what you are trying to do.