[MLton-devel] Minimizing space usage in ML (fwd)

[Henry Cejtin]

My  take  is  that  unless  you  have a reference counted GC, or at least the
reference counts, it isn't going to do much because you won't know which  way
to  change the reference.  I.e., if I have lots of pointers pointing to equal
things, then I would think that the normal behavior would be to just  shuffle
things  around  without  ever  causing any thing to be dead.  If you have the
count, then you can always change the pointer to the low count  to  point  to
the higher count and hence you are always lowering the minimum count.

If  MLton  had something in the heap indicating immutability (which could, of
course be generated from the stack and some code  tables  I  think)  then  we
could  do  the  sharing hack I described that I did long ago for Mathematica.
Alternatively, it could be a special kind of GC which did hash-consing.  Then
the bottom-up equality testing wouldn't cost too much (maybe).


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