Type-Directed Specialization of Polymorphism

AbstractFlexibility 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