Specializing expressions beyond names?

[Conal Elliott]

It seems to be the case that SPECIALIZE pragmas are syntactically
restricted to type specializations of a *name* (identifier) rather than a
general expression. Is my understanding correct here? If so, is there any
reason for this restriction?

I ask because I’m reifying Core code (into code that constructs a
corresponding run-time representation for further processing), and I’m
looking for a clean way to integrate that process with GHC, to support
separate compilation and to avoid interfering with GHC’s regular flow. It
occurred to me that I could enable separate compilation via a pragma of the
form “{-# SPECIALIZE reify foo ∷ E t #-}” for some t, where E t is a
reified form of values of type t. Type checking would infer the specialized
type of foo, and the usual specialization phase would do its usual thing on
that specialization, leaving “reify foo = reify specialized_foo”, and then
the reification compiler plugin would transform the right-hand side,
pushing the reify inward. Some reify calls may remain (e.g., due to
polymorphism), triggering future rule applications. As much as possible of
the fully-reified version would be factored out of the generated rule’s RHS
for cheap reuse.


Thanks, - Conal
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