[MLton-devel] monomorphisation and the opus

[Matthew Fluet]

> 1. How do we best describe the monomorphiser as it currently
> exists?  Right now, the description is by example only.  The main
> questions are whether (a) such a description is sufficient, and (b)
> is statement/proof of correctness necessary?  I think (a) is probably
> ok if we don't have (b), but is insufficient if we do.  Unfortunately,
> I don't see any way of describing (b) without giving a detailed
> algorithm.

My guess is that the examples should be sufficient, unless we come up with
a simple way of presenting (b).

> 2. There is an orthogonal question on whether we want to elaborate
> this section to include a discussion of how the monomorphiser could
> be adapted to deal with polymorphic recursion.  I'm not advocating
> a detailed presentation, but we have had some discussion on this
> point in the past; is this issue important enough to warrant a subsection
> that contains an informal discussion on the topic?

I don't think it necessarily belongs in the opus, for two reasons.  One,
it's not currently supported by MLton.  Second, I wouldn't say that the
(to be invented) technique is necessarily an adaptation of the
monomorphiser.  In particular, if we were to support this in MLton, then I
would imagine it would be a pass that ran _before_ monomorphisation that
rewrote the program into a form that could be monomorphised.  Again, it's
not really a MLton specific technique -- it would really be applicable to
any SML-user (in the sense that they could rewrite their programs into
Standard ML; obviously, it could also be automated and added to
compilers).  Someone used to have a patch to SML/NJ 0.93 that made it
support poly-rec, but it's broken since SML/NJ moved to a (more strongly)
typed IL.  But, a geneneral poly-rec->SML translation would be applicable
in SML/NJ even though they don't monomorphise.




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