If you're willing to talk about compilation time or other not-just-runtime-microbenchmark costs in your cost model (hello ABI stability / version-stable separate compilation! hello user cognitive load / predictability!) the picture gets _much_ murkier.
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Yeah it's an interesting landscape. I bring it up because often 'zero cost' stuff sacrifices it. I'm just interested in having a healthier, more honest design discussion.
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Even if the _runtime_ cost model is just a bit more complex -- eg. if you start wondering whether all the specialized copies or unrolling/inlining is hurting cache -- you lose sight of clear answers. Speculative devirt, polymorphic inline cache, trace-jit: ??? heuristic-ville
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Hey, I just want to say, I really appreciate these responses. Lots of really good food for though. Thanks! 🥰
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It's been on my mind a lot lately when thinking of where to _not_ spend optimization energy in new languages. I think the perspective of staging / specializing is helpful. Like consider your compiler as deciding not just "abstractions to look through" but values to specialize-on.
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It's tempting to think that a compiler is only looking-through abstractions; but in many cases it's also baking-in (possibly to a partial replica) assumptions made when looking-through, and those carry costs both for the replicas and for handling cases when assumptions are wrong.
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(Absurd limit case: specializing programs on every possible input. But less absurd: every one of N scalars used as array sizes? Every one of X*Y caller/callee combinations?)
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This why I’m following the work of , , and with interest! Not sure if it will fulfill my needs though. 🤔
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Staging à la Pfenning and Davies in the Granule pipeline atm.
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Such excitement. Sorry I know I’m like a broken record at this point!
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Dude, your enthusiasm for PLT stuff is no small part of what’s been keeping my gears turning lately, pretty sure we all welcome a little excitement (and a little nudging to actually do the thing, hah)
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Thanks, that means a lot actually. It’s what I try to do at least. It feels like a bunch of this stuff is on the cusp of combining together into something really cool, and I want to see it happen!
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