Re: Fat references vindicated

On 2010-01-08, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> I just published some significant benchmark results:
>
> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/hlvm-on-ray-tracer-language-comparison.html


I don't see fat references being vindicated.


The apparent winner of the benchmark is a C++ program running on a C++
implementation that presumably does not use fat references.


In the same blog entry above you do not argue about fat references,
but rather that HLVM comes close to C++ because, like the C++ program,
its inner loop computations are done with unboxed numbers. (Which is
plausible).


Use of unboxed numeric values, and use of fat references, are orthogonal ideas.


Fat references merely make it /easy/ to implement unboxed numbers in
the face of a garbage collector that is ignorant of static type.


By using these fat references, you have built a ``four-lane highway'',
which paves the way for all your ``wide loads'' like double-precision
floats to travel anywhere that references can go. Any generic storage
location that can hold a reference also has enough space to hold an
unboxed number.


You don't think benchmarks could be written which reveal performance
disadvantages in fat references?

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