🚀 go-pugleaf

IMHO, the best way of making a language "downward-extensible" is not
to touvch the language at all. Instead, you add to the compiler's
transformation-strategy library (we're talking about a fairly radical
compiler here) a note to the effect that this piece of code you want
to go fast is equivalent to this other piece of code - if you're being
careful you also provide a formal proof, and if not you just give your
initials and the date :-).

Then the compiler can, if the optimisation level is low, compile just
what you wrote; if the optimisation level is high, it compiles both
options in parallel until it has reached a point where one clearly
dominates the other under the current regime (space/time/resource
availability and so forth).

We already trust the compiler to do much of our optimisation. Making
that compiler smarter, possibly interactively, is what we want to do
next.

Maybe we can even give up on our source languages being a priori
implementable by now - ditching everything but the specs.

stephen p spackman  stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu  312.702.3982