[m-dev.] State of Play?

[David Overton]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2000 at 02:50:42AM +1000, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> On 27-Jul-2000, Ralph Becket <rbeck at microsoft.com> wrote:
> > I was wondering what the state of play was wrt
> > the inclusion into the compiler of several extensions 
> > that people seem to have been working on for a while
> > now, in particular:
> > 
> > 2. Nested unique modes (in whatever limited form).
> 
> In our CVS repository, there is an `alias' branch, which has a version
> of the compiler that supports those, if I understand things correctly.
> Unfortunately that version has some unsolved performance problems.
> Currently no-one is working on solving those or merging the alias
> branch back with the main branch.

The approach tried in the alias branch led to extremely complicated
code in the mode analysis and in many other parts of the compiler that
need to deal with insts/modes.  After working with it for quite a
while and failing to get it working properly and get decent performance
from it I have now given up and am trying a different approach to mode
analysis which should make analysing nested unique modes much easier.

> 
> > 4. Polymorphic (ground) modes.
> 
> One of the main things this is waiting on is for the operations like
> `std_util__construct' and `io__read' to be put in type classes.
> Zoltan has done some work towards reoganizing the RTTI stuff and I
> think he plans to do more in the short to medium term.
> 
> I think there was/is/will be some work done on the other part, i.e.
> allowing inst variables in predicate mode declarations.  Off-hand I'm
> not sure what the current status of that is.

I did some work on this a few months ago, but have been busy with
other things lately.  Most of the work is done, I think all that is
required is to update my workspace to the latest version of the
compiler and do lots of testing.  I'll try to get this done some time
soon.


David
-- 
David Overton      Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
PhD Student        The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
+61 3 8344 9159    http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~dmo
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