Odersky: Compiling Generics Through UserDirected Type Specialization

Compilation of polymorphic code through type erasure gives compact code but performance on primitive types is signif-icantly hurt. Full specialization gives good performance, but at the cost of increased code size and compilation time. Instead we propose a mixed approach, which allows the pro-grammer to decide what code to specialize. Our approach supports separate compilation, allows mixing of specialized and generic code, and gives very good results in practice