Cost of Overloading vs. HOFs

[Stefan O'Rear]

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