Compiling Match Statements to Bytecode

(xnacly.me)

22 points | by ingve 4 days ago ago

5 comments

  • i_don_t_know 2 days ago ago

    Simon Peyton Jones's "The implementation of functional programming languages" has a chapter on the "Efficient compilation of pattern matching" (chapter 5 by Philip Wadler).

    https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-2up...

  • discardable_dan a day ago ago

    As someone who has implemented full match in several industrial languages: this isn’t really match; it doesn’t not handle unpacking. And that is by far the only interesting bit. This feature is more accurately called `cond` à la Scheme, and you can fully expand it away ahead of type checking. Looking at unpacking in the arms, even with Scheme’s truth-y values and `=>`, could be neat.

    Optimizing well-known jumps is useful, as is branch reordering, but the tombstone flag is unnecessary; you can simply write down a list of all targeted / called blocks and perform dead block elimination more generally that way.

    • rwmj a day ago ago

      Golang is a blub language, so not really surprising.