This looks pretty awesome, and holds much promise for the future.
Optimal beta reduction has always seemed like something of theoretical interest only, but Victor has been working many years on making it more practical, which deserves a lot of respect.
> HVM files look like untyped Haskell.
Why not make it look exactly like Haskell?
So that every valid Haskell program is automatically a valid Hvm program,
while the reverse need not hold due to hvm being untyped.
Instead the syntax looks like a mix of Haskell and Lisp, with parentheses around application, and prefix operators. I prefer the cleaner Haskell syntax.
Some of the speedup examples look somewhat artificial:
The exponential speedup is on 2^n compositions of the identity function,
which has no practical use. It would be nice to show such a speedup on a nontrivial function.
The arithmetical example uses a binary representation, but strangely uses unary implementation of operators, with addition implemented as repeated increment, and multiplication as repeated addition. Why not use binary implementation of operators? Does that not show a good speedup?
> HVM files look like untyped Haskell.
Why not make it look exactly like Haskell? So that every valid Haskell program is automatically a valid Hvm program, while the reverse need not hold due to hvm being untyped.
Instead the syntax looks like a mix of Haskell and Lisp, with parentheses around application, and prefix operators. I prefer the cleaner Haskell syntax.
Some of the speedup examples look somewhat artificial:
The exponential speedup is on 2^n compositions of the identity function, which has no practical use. It would be nice to show such a speedup on a nontrivial function.
The arithmetical example uses a binary representation, but strangely uses unary implementation of operators, with addition implemented as repeated increment, and multiplication as repeated addition. Why not use binary implementation of operators? Does that not show a good speedup?