It's obvious that avoiding pointer chasing, improving locality and reducing
storage will in some cases improve performance considerably. I've found many
discussions about unboxing, but I haven't seen any solutions that would
satisfy high-performance-computing programmers, who would probably like to
have better (i.e. fine-grained) control over memory layout (unboxing double
arrays isn't enough). In C++ this is trivial, because C++ is just an
abstraction of assembly code. To cut it short,  could not we have basically
the same affordances of C++ in ocaml by annotating type definitions to
indicate where unboxing would be forced? Such annotations aren't a new idea
in programming languages, specifically HPF was based largely on parallel
storage annotations.

Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural, PhD candidate.  Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara