Re: [Caml-list] The fastest stream library [Was: Question about

[Oleg <oleg@okmij.org>]

Gabriel, 

        Thank you for the detailed and thoughtful message and the
motivations behind Enum choices. The library and language design was
the central issue in our paper. We do have a different overall
approach, which you haven't yet touched. The approach is
meta-programming. 

        It is high-performance community who discovered for themselves
that the most promising way to increase or maintain performance is by
meta-programming. It was late Ken Kennedy (of High-Performance Fortran
fame) who came with telescoping languages and popularized the idea of
active libraries. It was again Ken Kennedy who coined the phrase
``abstraction without guilt''. The references (in old, by now) paper
make the case that become even clearer by now
        http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~acohen/publications/CDGHKP06.ps.gz

Thus we can have a very general interface and still very efficient
implementation. We can have a pure functional, a fully compositional
interface and a very tangled, imperative implementation with
reference cells all over. The strymonas library is an example of that.