[wg-camlp4] Runtime types and no -pp(x)

[Markus Mottl]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Sebastien Mondet
<sebastien.mondet at gmail.com> wrote:
> The proposal:
>
> Get something like dyntype [1] or what Pierre Chambart and Grégoire Henry
> presented at OUD [2], into the main compiler.
>
> type_conv and deriving will become obsolete.

I'd be happy to see cleaner and simpler solutions than ones based on
camlp4.  The latter is powerful, but quite a beast.  I'd also love to
see support for runtime type representations in the compiler.  But I
don't think the latter will fill everybody's needs, especially when it
comes to performance.  E.g. knowing the number of constructors in a
type gives great opportunities for optimizing protocols and the code
used to handle them.  This cannot be easily done without prohibitively
high costs at runtime.  Unless, maybe, we also manage to get runtime
code generation into the compiler in the spirit of MetaOCaml, but
that's a whole different story.

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl at gmail.com