Cost of Overloading vs. HOFs

Stefan O'Rear stefanor at cox.net
Fri May 4 20:13:02 EDT 2007


On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 05:06:10PM -0700, Conal Elliott wrote:
> Cool.  You know which types to consider because jhc is a whole-program
> compiler?
> 
> Given the whole program, why not monomorphize, and inline away all of the
> dictionaries?

Because compilation might take forever - it is possible to write a
program that uses a statically unbounded number of types.  See
Data.Sequence for a non-contrived example of this.  (In fairness the
issue won't appear because Data.Sequence doesn't use overloading, but
in general this is a problem.)

Stefan


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