An Overview of the Flint/ml Compiler

The FLINT project at Yale aims to build a state-of-the-art systems environment for modern type-safe languages. One important component of the FLINT system is a high-performance type-directed compiler for SML'97 (extended with higher-order modules). The FLINT/ML compiler provides several new capabilities that are not available in other type-based compilers: type-directed compilation is carried over across the higher-order module boundaries; recursive and mutable data objects can use unboxed representations without incurring expensive runtime cost on heavily polymorphic code; parameterized modules (functors) can be selectively specialized, just as normal polymorphic functions; new type representations are used to reduce the cost of type manipulation thus the compilation time. This paper gives an overview of these novel aspects, and a preliminary report on the current status of the implementation.

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