[m-dev.] Equality and pointer equality

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On 12-Oct-2004, Peter Ross <pro at missioncriticalit.com> wrote:
> >It may be cute, but it wouldn't work, because it would break any promises
> >of uniqueness.

> But wouldn't be able to work out when it is safe to do this by using the 
> mode system, and calling a version of the unification predicate which 
> did this only when it was safe to do so?

Only if you specialized the code of all the type-specific unify predicates
to the precise mix of types and uniqueness annotations at hand. The cost
in code size would be quite big. (Right now, those predicate are rough 10% of
code size; with the specializations required, it would be 30-50%.) And even
then, there is the problem that the unify predicates, like all other
predicates, have their arguments passed by value. You can't change the
input variables unless you change the parameter passing convention to call
by reference or call by copy/return, and both of those have significant
negative performance impacts. I strongly doubt the overall performance
impact would be positive.

Zoltan.
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