Greets, On Sat 09 Jan 2010 11:44, Thien-Thi Nguyen <t...@gnuvola.org> writes:
> Would there be any interest in adding (ice-9 accumulate) to Guile? > > - > http://www.gnuvola.org/software/guile/doc/Efficient-Accumulation.html Speaking only for myself, I would be unlikely to use it; but OTOH I am not against having it. > I can see several arguments against doing so: You are not selling your idea very well here. But I'm still OK with it :) > - The interface is procedural, possibly defeating compiler optimization. > When i wrote it, it was an exercise for hobbit. The hope was that > hobbit could eventually learn to optimize usage of (ice-9 accumulate) > calls to (strength-, complexity-)reduce them to (ice-9 q) calls, where > other data-oriented optimizations can come into play. Perhaps that > hope was only a non-compiler-geek dream (sounds nice but unfeasible). > Perhaps Andy can either revive this hope or kindly kill it off now? So, here's the deal, as far as I understand inlining... (And your question is about inlining, afaics, in the sense that the Waddell paper treats inlining) (1) Inlining across module boundaries: personally I have no intention of hacking on this, beyond approaches like define-integrable (see the end of http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/syntax.html). The fundamental issue is that our modules are first-class rather than syntactic. Define-integrable allows you to make a step towards the syntactic, a very useful step. (2) Inlining of procedures defined within one file/module: We will probably do this, probably by treating private bindings from a module as being letrec-bound within the module. (3) Inlining of let or letrec-bound procedures: We will do this at some point, and do it fairly well. But, in this case, we still wouldn't be able to inline very well, because it's an side-effecting interface. Once you have side effects, it gets hard to reason about, especially in the presence of continuations -- and you usually don't know when a continuation may be captured. So this particular construct is unlikely to be inlined nicely. However, it's useful to you, and might be useful to someone else. > - There is already something in Guile. [If so, where? Thanks.] There's lots of stuff in ice-9 that noone knows about, but I don't think there's something like this. Hopefully we can document more of it using the new (texinfo reflection) infrastructure. > Of course, the primary argument *for* adding it would be to make porting > my stuff to Guile easier. That's a selfish argument, so take it FWIW. Well, we'd like your energy as well, so selfishness on all sides... Cheers, Andy -- http://wingolog.org/
