Wait. Has any of those techniques (beyond build systems) been demonstrated in compilers?
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We incremental computation researchers cannot say it to get published, but the basic assumption for readers seems that these techniques aren’t really black boxes and writing any essentially new program with them is a new paper, unless your program is already well *parallelized*!
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By that do you mean that it’s hard to transfer the techniques between programs? Or hard to get reliable performance improvements?
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See other replies: it’s hard to get performance improvements. You can write highly parallel reusable primitives (such as folds that require associativity and whose computation tree is balanced, or many query languages ops), then use them for your program.
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Let me admit I did a PhD on this and realized the issue halfway, so there might be a “disgruntled failed employee” vibe to this (and I haven’t studied the type systems to guide authors of incremental programs).
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I would say that most compilers I've seen are very embarrassingly structured and don't adequately isolate/track dependencies at the crude level they "ought" to be able to from the language semantics. So wind up redoing vast amounts of work every run.
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(Much of this, in turn, derives from the _extremely_ convoluted rules for name lookup in virtually every real language. If you can't easily and precisely figure out what a source entity depends on name-wise, you're cooked, gotta back off to the whole TU. Which is really common!)
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(Like if I had one piece of advice for language design it'd be to keep your name lookup rules as simple as possible, not intertwined with type checking, not involving any forms of global overload disambiguation, argument-dependence or whatever. It's a hairball almost everywhere.)
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Hum, interesting. Might using dependent records for my module system make this horrific?
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Do you also have abstract type members? The early papers on ML modules use Sigma-types and have no abstraction (unlike the real thing??), which they never seem to mention? Lillibridge was the first to address this.
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I want to be able to make definitions private. But I don't have that implemented yet.