Re: Evolution & optimization of the module system

[Kevin Ryde]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
> Well it _does_ hurt, even with real-life numbers of imports, as the
> experiments I made tend to show

If that's true you'll have to start from the beginning again,
everyone's eyes glaze over at "1000 modules".

> From a performance viewpoint, the question is: how can we
> provide the fastest variable lookup and duplicate binding detection,
> i.e., using what data structures and algorithms?

There's no need to think too hard about the data until the innermost
code dealing with them is in C.

I guess the general problem is sets of names to be combined and looked
up with certain precedence.  I can't see anything much to help that
without using quite a bit of extra memory (which of course is bad for
gc, and bad for the system generally because it's unshared).

One possibility for duplicates would be lazy checking, only check for
a clash when actually using a symbol.  That's sort of the prolog
theory: don't worry now about what might never come up.  I suspect the
total work would end up greater though.