Deterministic Proposal

[Guy Ellis]

What was drawing me to this idea is that the compiler is already doing
performance optimization and a typical performance optimization is
memoization. If the compiler were aware that it could memoize the results
of a function it could determine this on-the-fly in a way that a library
would not be able to. i.e. the compiler has access to metrics that the
library does not have access to. I'm theorizing that the compiler could
significantly outperform a library based solution here. Do you think that
there might be any validity to that theory?

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 4:11 PM Guy Ellis <wildfiction at gmail.com> wrote:

> @kdex I initially thought of decorators but did not know that there were
> plans for a standard library that compilers would be "aware of" and would
> be able to draw this from. Thanks!
>
> On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 4:03 PM kdex <kdex at kdex.de> wrote:
>
>> Can already be solved using decorators. Thus, no need for new syntax.
>> If we get a standard library to import some common decorators from, one
>> could
>> easily write:
>>
>> ```js
>> import { memoize } from "std::decorators";
>> @memoize
>> function sum(a, b) {
>>         return a + b;
>> }
>> ```
>>
>> On Wednesday, June 21, 2017 12:58:43 AM CEST Guy Ellis wrote:
>> > I have an idea rattling around that allowing the developer to mark a
>> > function as deterministic would allow the compiler to determine if a
>> > speed/memory memoization trade-off will improve performance.
>> >
>> > Possible syntax:
>> >
>> > deterministic function sum(a, b) { return a + b; }
>> >
>> > Use case:
>> >
>> > I can only think of one right now: compiler memoization
>> >
>> > Why not a memoization library?
>> >
>> > I'm not a compiler expert. I've read that today's compilers are doing
>> > optimizations at runtime based on call frequency and other metrics that
>> > they collect. If a compiler knows that a function is deterministic it
>> will
>> > be able to use call time metrics against the return value size to
>> determine
>> > if memoization should be done on specific calls.
>> >
>> > I think (I could be completely wrong here) that the compiler has access
>> to
>> > memory metrics that a memoization library would not have access to in
>> order
>> > to optimize this
>> on-the-fly._______________________________________________
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>>
>
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