Type System for Specializing Polymorphism

Abstract. Flexibility of programming and efficiency of program execution are two important features of a programming language. Unfortunately, however, there is an inherent conflict between these features in design and implementation of a modern statically typed programming language. Flexibility is achieved by high-degree of polymorphism, which 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 first present a method for coherent transformation of an ML style polymorphic language into an explicitly typed calculus. We then analyze the existing methods for compiling record calculus and unboxed calculus, extract their common structure, and develop a framework for type based specialization of polymorphism.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: TACS
• Authors: Atsushi Ohori
• Keywords: Polymorphic Primitives, Programming Language, Software Engineering, Statically Typed Programming Language, TACS 1997