Staged Generic Programming

As with all efforts to simplify programming so that systems of greater complexity can be more easily created, there are issues to consider.

8. Conclusion

We have shown how to apply existing and novel multi-stage programming techniques to transform a popular generic programming library into an optimising code generator. Our staging of SYB combines the following attributes:

Efficient : while generic programming libraries often suffer from poor performance, the output of the staged library is comparable to hand-written code.

Incremental: the staging is decomposed into a series of local changes with virtuous interactions, maintaining the original structure of the library.

Type-safe: MetaOCaml’s type safety properties ensure that the staged library never generates ill-typed code.

Reusable: the staging techniques presented here deal with the core elements of functional programming: algebraic data, higher-order functions, recursion, etc. We anticipate that these techniques will apply to a wide class of programs.