A Question About Types and Inlining

[Jim Grundy <jim_grundy@ichips.intel.com>]

Apologies in advance for a naive question...

I'm working on a SAT solver in OCaml.  The solver has various types, 
like three-valued bools, variables, literals.  I have modules that 
encapsulate these types and the operations on them.

Now, as it turns out, all these types are represented as ints, but the 
other modules that use those types don't need to know that - and as a 
matter of taste I'd rather not expose this.

The signatures of these modules currently contain lines like this:

type variable (* = int *)

If I uncomment all instances of (* = int *) and reveal the 
representation to the compiler then I get a ... 36% performance 
improvement in the SAT solver.

I have two questions:

1/ Is there some way I can reveal this representation to the parts of 
the system that clearly need it for effective optimization, without 
opening this up for general use.

2/ Failing that, has someone got a pleasant method of doing conditional 
compilation so that I can switch these comments on and off with ease?

I'm using version 3.09.2 of ocamlopt.

Thanks in advance

Jim


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Jim Grundy, Research Scientist. Intel Corporation, Strategic CAD Labs
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