General Recursion via Coinductive Types — mentioned by chriswarbo

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 17:27:29 GMT

> On paper perhaps, but I have yet to see a compiler that can take any arbitrary recursive subroutine and automatically optimize it into a Tail Call Optimized (that is, transform the recursive parts into goto/jumps similar to a loop) version. General recursion can be modelled coinductively via the "Delay" or "Partial" type, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0505037 Type-inference can figure out when recursive calls need to be wrapped in `Later`. We can then compile into a single `while` loop to unwrap the layers.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

General Recursion via Coinductive Types · HackerPapers discussions

General Recursion via Coinductive Types — mentioned by chriswarbo