[jhc] Grin.

[John Meacham]

On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 11:43:58AM +0100, Lemmih wrote:
> What about the missed optimization opportunities? In the GRIN paper,
> Boquist shows how 'foldl (+) 0 [1..n]' could be compiled to a strict
> loop with no allocations. Without points-to analysis (which seems to
> be completely disable at this point) most of the important
> optimizations are blocked and the resulting program is far less
> efficient than it should be.

No, it only falls back to indirect evaluation when the standard grin
transformation would have not been able to improve matters much, as in,
when it would have ended up a large cache-killing case scrutininization
anyway. Many cases can be directly transformed into loops just like the
original Grin paper. The idea was to turn the points-to analysis from a
fundamental method of correctness into a powerful optimization
primitive. (but not strictly necessary for compilation). I went through
several iterations of 'points-to' analysis as the jhc internals evolved.
This continual retooling of the analysis was something I was hoping to
avoid in the future by allowed the indirect fallback.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈