Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] [CHICKEN 5] Change numerics representations

[felix . winkelmann]

> On Tue, Aug 09, 2016 at 10:31:54AM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
> > > All in all, I think these changes are worthwhile but for the caveat
> > > that it results in us having NO MORE reserved type tags left!  In
> > > fact, the complete change is only possible because we dropped the
> > > SWIG pointer type; before that we only had two reserved types left.
> > > I don't see an easy way to reclaim type tags elsewhere; we don't have
> > > that many.  Maybe (but only MAYBE) we could get rid of lambda info as
> > > a separate core type.
> >
> > Maybe we can phase out the "tagged pointer" type? Having one reserved tag
> > left would be a good thing, IMHO.
>
> By the way, you didn't go into detail about my idea to remove lambda info
> as a separate type.  Can you explain why (if?) this needs to be a
> separate type?  As far as I can tell, it's just a glorified string that
> lives in the procedure decoration area.  I guess it's because this would
> cost us at least 3 more words per closure? (but only if lambda info is
> enabled, of course)

I recall that it was slightly easier to identify the lambda-info when it's a 
separate type.
There may be other ways to implement this, though. But it would be 
counterproductive
to increase memory usage for lambda-information just to reduce memory usage
for bignums instead (which might be less frequent thatn the former).


felix