Changeset cbef27b for doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/conclusion.tex

Timestamp:

Apr 26, 2019, 4:56:16 PM (7 years ago)

Author:

Thierry Delisle <tdelisle@…>

Branches:

ADT, arm-eh, ast-experimental, cleanup-dtors, enum, forall-pointer-decay, jacob/cs343-translation, jenkins-sandbox, master, new-ast, new-ast-unique-expr, pthread-emulation, qualifiedEnum, stuck-waitfor-destruct

Children:

8d63649

Parents:

3898392 (diff), bd405fa (diff)
Note: this is a merge changeset, the changes displayed below correspond to the merge itself.
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Message:

Merge branch 'master' into jenkins-sandbox

File:

• doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/conclusion.tex (modified) (1 diff)

doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/conclusion.tex

@@ -7 +7 @@
 The combination of these practical improvements and added features significantly improve the viability of \CFA{} as a practical programming language.
 
-Further improvements to the \CFA{} type-system are still possible, however. 
+Further improvements to the \CFA{} type system are still possible, however. 
 One area suggested by this work is development of a scheme for user-defined conversions; to integrate properly with the \CFA{} conversion model, there would need to be a distinction between safe and unsafe conversions, and possibly a way to denote conversions as explicit-only or non-chainable. 
-Another place for ongoing effort is improvement of compilation performance; I believe the most promising direction for that is rebuilding the \CFA{} compiler on a different framework than Bilson's \CFACC{}. 
+Another place for ongoing effort is improvement of compilation performance; I believe the most promising direction for that effort is rebuilding the \CFA{} compiler on a different framework than Bilson's \CFACC{}. 
 The resolver prototype presented in this work has good performance and already has the basics of \CFA{} semantics implemented, as well as many of the necessary core data structures, and would be a viable candidate for a new compiler architecture. 
 An alternate approach would be to fork an existing C compiler such as Clang~\cite{Clang}, which would need to be modified to use one of the resolution algorithms discussed here, as well as various other features introduced by Bilson~\cite{Bilson03}.
+
+More generally, the algorithmic techniques described in this thesis may be useful to implementors of other programming languages. 
+In particular, the demonstration of practical performance for polymorphic return-type inference suggests the possibility of eliding return-type-only template parameters in \CC{} function calls, though integrating such an extension into \CC{} expression resolution in a backwards-compatible manner may be challenging. 
+The \CFA{} expression resolution problem also bears some similarity to the \emph{local type inference} model put forward by Pierce \& Turner \cite{Pierce00} and Odersky \etal{} \cite{Odersky01}; compiler implementors for languages like Scala \cite{Scala}, which performs type inference based on this model, may be able to profitably adapt the algorithms and data structures presented in this thesis.