Type-Directed Specialization of Polymorphism

Atsushi Ohori

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Flexibility of programming and efficiency of program execution are two important features of a programming language. Unfortunately, however, these two features conflict with each other in design and implementation of a modern statically typed programming language. Flexibility is achieved by a high-degree of polymorphism, which is based on generic primitives in an abstract model of computation, while efficiency requires optimal use of low-level primitives specialized to individual data structures. The motivation of this work is to reconcile these two features by developing a mechanism for specializing polymorphic primitives based on static type information. We analyze the existing methods for compiling a record calculus and an unboxed calculus, extract their common structure, and develop a framework for type-directed specialization of polymorphism.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)64-107
Number of pages44
JournalInformation and Computation
Volume155
Issue number1-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1999 Nov 25
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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