Hi,
I was complentating the cons cells in guile an was wondering if we could pack our cons cells better than today. So this is some notes about this.
Currently if x is a cons cell we have the relation
x -> [SCMCAR,SCMCDR]
This is really neat and makes guiles conses quite compact e.g. a vector y of two elements is
y -> [SCMTAG,SCMV1,SCMV2], where SCMTAG containes the datatype tag and length of the
vector.
To compress even further we need a way to could use
x ->[SCM/2/SCM/2], witt SCM/2 the same tagging half the size as the normal SCM with the interpretation that if
SCM/2 is a non emediate then it starts with 00 and is then interpreted as a signed integer i and the real adress is x + i, e.g. a relative adress regarding.
We of cause must also add a fat cons cell of the form
x -> [Tag,X,Y] for the case when SCM/2 is not fitting. Currently I can't see this beeing common. But
if we later makes floating point represented via nan boxing e.g. stored directly in a 64bit value then
the cons cell will be mostly fat and there would be a speed reduction using cons cells. On the other hand there has been a considerable speed.
There is a final sematic case that needs to be fixed. if we do a setcar on a thin cons cell and the cell
then becomes fat, we need to create the following
x -> oldthin -> newfat
e.g. we need to add a pointer type with the meaning of automatically follow the pointer if we encounter it. then oldthin is also tagging a variant of a cons cell. It is possible to keep it slim
in the code that all fat cons cells is represented like that.
How would a SCM_CAR be like?
SCM SCM_CAR(SCM x)
if(THIN(x))
{
}