[HN Gopher] Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks...
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       Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
       (2019)
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2021-08-06 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.sigplan.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.sigplan.org)
        
       | Groxx wrote:
       | So... specialization? It's a very common thing when talking about
       | generics in programming languages, anyway.
        
       | kristianp wrote:
       | On continuations: "This suggests that language-level support for
       | defunctionalization could be used to keep the beauty of explicit
       | continuations while gaining the scalability of multiple machines.
       | 
       | A few systems, such as the MFlow and jmacro-rpc frameworks, have
       | tried to circumvent this problem by sending continuations over
       | the wire in a different way: by sending over information about
       | the execution's past, so that the other machine may replay a
       | function call in order to get to where the first machine left
       | off. This can be seen as an application of my ICFP 2018 paper on
       | thermometer continuations."
        
       | contravariant wrote:
       | Put like this defunctionalisation is just eval for a domain-
       | specific-language that you hope doesn't do the things you don't
       | want it to.
        
       | choeger wrote:
       | The thing is, and the article correctly mentions it, that
       | defunctionalization sacrifices composability. This is not just a
       | technical matter, mind you. If you design your distributed system
       | around defunctionalized higher-order functions, you have to
       | ensure that client and server have the same understanding of
       | valid parameters. That's a non-trivial problem.
       | 
       | So while this might be a cool technique for whole-program
       | compilers, I think it doesn't really fit into anything that has
       | an API boundary.
        
       | SinParadise wrote:
       | The article in video form:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNwukfhsOME
        
       | cyanydeez wrote:
       | i,m too dumb for this ideza
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-06 23:00 UTC)