Memory footprints: OCaml vs HLVM
Someone recently published a blog article about the sizes of values in the Ruby and OCaml programming languages. This is also interesting in the context of HLVM because our high performance goals also require an efficient memory representation but our solution is quite different to OCaml's because HLVM is designed for numerical performance whereas OCaml was designed for symbolic performance. The following table lists the sizes of values of several different types in OCaml and HLVM on 32-bit architectures: Type OCaml HLVM unit 32 bits 32 bits bool 32 bits 8 bits int31 32 bits None int32 96 bits 32 bits int64 128 bits 64 bits float32 None 32 bits float64 128 bits 64 bits float * float 320 bits 128 bits Enumeration 32 bits 96 bits float64 array 64+64n bits 96+64n bits Note how HLVM uses the most memory efficient representations possible for ints, floating point numbers and tuples but uses less efficient representations for reference types such as arrays and variant types. A side-eff...