Re: Update and Questions

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Noah,

And as is more often the case, sorry for the delay!

Noah Lavine <address@hidden> skribis:

> It is a propagation network. Basically you have a graph of Tree-IL
> nodes, where each Tree-IL node is connected to its parent, its
> children, and optionally other nodes (a variable is connected to the
> place it was declared. A primitive function is connected to the error
> continuation it could jump to). The compiler propagates information
> along the edges of this graph, attempting to find the minimum set of
> possible values for each variable and each jump target. It also
> performs partial evaluation as a special case of this.
>
> What I have described also seems to be how Hindley-Milner type
> inference works (although I think we can do a bit better than standard
> Hindley-Milner systems). Does this seem like a good design for the
> static analyzer portion?

I’m not an expert in that area, but it does look sensible to me at first
sight.

> One big oversight that I know of is that this doesn't do any sort of
> specialization.

What if your static analyzer was plugged after the peval run?  I expect
part of it would be redundant with peval, but for a start we could live
with the code redundancy, and look at factorizing it later.  WDYT?

[...]

> And finally, a fun thing. The current best Scheme compiler (that I
> know of) is called Stalin. Therefore, I suggest that our compiler be
> called "Stallman", after our fearless leader (whose name also starts
> with "s"). :-)

Heheh. :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.