Re: Medium-term road map

[Andy Wingo]

On Sat 25 Apr 2020 15:37, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

>   2. Performance.  There are many things we can improve there, first and
>      foremost: the “Computing derivation” part of ‘guix pull’, Guile’s
>      compiler terrible time and space requirements

I think I have a solution here, as discussed on IRC.  Basic idea is to
make a direct compiler from Tree-IL to bytecode, skipping the CPS step.
The result won't be optimal in terms of generated code quality (I
estimate on average 2x slowdown) but it will be very cheap to produce (I
estimate 10x improvement in time, and going from O(n log n) space to
O(n), with better constant factors.  We'd use this compiler for -O0 or
maybe even -O1 code.

Got to spend a few days working it up tho!

Andy