[Haskell] Boxing (Day) Question

Niklas Sorensson nik at cs.chalmers.se
Mon Dec 26 12:45:09 EST 2005


>> I can imagine that it is akward to delay code generation until all uses
>> of a function are known, and that in some cases there may be infinitely
>> many instances needed. But apart from that, what are the reasons
>> against this implementation technique?
>
> What made you think that this technique isn't used?

I'm not sure. It seems I didn't hear it from any official sources
at least :)

> It is used in GHC. However, there are cases where it can't be used, most
> notably with polymorphic recursion, existential types or higher-rank
> polymorphism.

That's what I thought. But I'm still curious when it is used, and why
it isn't a suitable solution for unboxed polymorhic functions in most
cases.

/Niklas



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