[MLton-user] MLton on mswin7 absurdly slow ?

[John B Thiel]

Thanks Anders, Matthew, and Henry.

Anders, your suggestion of a fixed/max heap worked.  The helloworld
compiles in 30-50 seconds on a 1.66GHz/1GB ram/mswin7 notebook (well
loaded, 12+ apps open),  given a 100MB heap limit -- either of:

$ mlton @MLton max-heap 0.1g -- hello.sml
$ mlton @MLton fixed-heap 0.1g -- hello.sml


Compilation failed to complete with a 50MB heap limit as follows:
$ mlton @MLton max-heap 0.05g -- hello.sml
Out of memory with max heap size 53,739,520.


The 300MB core/5+ minute time previously reported, was stalling at
(per -verbose 3) :
   Compile SML starting
      pre codegen starting
         parseAndElaborate starting

It seems there is some runaway allocation with the default options on
Windows, that unnecessarily overdrives into swap/thrashing.


I understand the whole program compilation approach offers some
intriguing optimization possibilities. Any "real world"
metrics/anecdotes on % speedups vs other functional languages?