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Thank you for the explanation. While that explain what makes MLton special, I now wonder why other compilers aren't doing the same. There is probably lots of mo

by Zababa 5y ago

Thank you for the explanation. While that explain what makes MLton special, I now wonder why other compilers aren't doing the same. There is probably lots of money to make by optimising some performance critical code, especially C/C++. But you seem to say that MLton is one of a kind. I don't understand that part.

jjice 5y ago
The full program optimization is more applicable in a more formally specified language like SML I believe. Big projects take quite some time to compile, which is definitely a pain while developing. So I'm out of my depth at this point, but this post from the SE Stack Exchange was interesting in that it highlights that those cross boundary optimizations can be handled at link time. I'm not sure how much is possible compared to MLton. MLton will have more access to type info, I'd assume, but maybe some metadata is stored in a .o file that I'm just not aware of. I don't know much about this serious level of optimization, but I assume big C compilers get optimizations that are equally, if not more impressive and do just fine. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/370242 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/370242