Efficient data representation in polymorphic languages

Xavier Leroy (1, 2)

1 ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris
2 FORMEL

Languages with polymorphic types (e.g. ML) have traditionally been implemented using Lisp-like data representations—everything has to fit in one word, if necessary by being heap-allocated and handled through a pointer. The reason is that, in contrast with conventional statically-typed languages such as Pascal, it is not possible to assign one unique type to each expression at compile-time, an absolute requirement for using more efficient representations (e.g. unallocated multi-word values). In this paper, we show how to take advantage of the static polymorphic typing to mix correctly two styles of data representation in the implementation of a polymorphic language: specialized, efficient representations are used when types are fully known at compile-time; uniform, Lisp-like representations are used otherwise.

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Xavier Leroy. Efficient data representation in polymorphic languages. PLILP 1990: Programming Language Implementation and Logic Programming, Aug 1990, Linköping, Sweden. ⟨10.1007/BFb0024189⟩. ⟨hal-01499983⟩