Re: [Chicken-hackers] specialization

[Jim Ursetto]

On Aug 8, 2011, at 12:51 AM, Felix wrote:

> "specialization" means using the type-information obtained by the part
> of the compiler that performs an intraprocedural flow-analysis
> (enabled using "-scrutinize") and rewrite calls to core-library
> procedures that match a given set of argument types. There are quite a
> number of optimizations that can be done that way, starting from
> eliminating simple predicate calls up to using more efficient internal
> routines that omit argument checking.

Excellent!!

Does this (or will this someday) generalize to user types like SRFI-9 records, 
so we can ditch most uses of record-variants?

Also, is the ##sys#check-* idiom still valid or do we need to rewrite it to a 
conditional?  I.e. is this string-append optimized:

(##sys#check-string x)
(string-append x "foo")

or must we write:

(if (string? x)
    (string-append x "foo")
    (error "not a string"))

and in fact does this get optimized too:

(unless (string? x)
  (error "not a string"))
(string-append x "foo")

If I understand correctly it looks like any of the above will work.

Jim