Thanks John,
that's what I want to hear. Now the obvious follow up questions:
1) are anyone pursuing this line of work, and
2) is the software available?
Best wishes,
Tommy
John Hughes writes:
> The results of the GRIN experiment are written up in Urban Boquist's
> PhD thesis from last year, which you can fetch from his home page:
>
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~boquist/
>
> I found the results very exciting. It's true that GRIN uses a whole-program
> analysis, but in practice that turned out not to be particularly expensive
> (usually no more than 2% of compile time). If I remember rightly, Urban
> compiled programs up to around 10,000 lines without a problem, although the
> benchmarks in the thesis are much smaller. The code generated was on average
> three-and-a-half times faster than code from GHC, and in the best case 40
> times faster! That extra order of magnitude seems to come from conservative
> unfolding transformations which are effectively disabled in larger programs,
> which raises the possibility that, with more aggressive unfolding, a further
> substantial improvement in the running times of large programs might be
> achievable.
>
> I recommend the thesis heartily. I enjoyed reading it very much.
>
> John Hughes
