Abstract
Generic programming is accepted by the functional programming community as a valuable tool for program development. Several functional languages have adopted the generic scheme of type-indexed values. This scheme works by specialization of a generic function to a concrete type. However, the generated code is extremely inefficient compared to its hand-written counterpart. The performance penalty is so big that the practical usefulness of generic programming is compromised. In this paper we present an optimization algorithm that is able to completely eliminate the overhead introduced by the specialization scheme for a large class of generic functions. The presented technique is based on consumer–producer elimination as exploited by fusion, a standard general purpose optimization method. We show that our algorithm is able to optimize many practical examples of generic functions.
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Alimarine, A., Smetsers, S. (2005). Improved Fusion for Optimizing Generics. In: Hermenegildo, M.V., Cabeza, D. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3350. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30557-6_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30557-6_16
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