Compiling pattern matching to in-place modifications
Paul Iannetta, Laure Gonnord, Gabriel Radanne · 2021
Algebraic data types and pattern matching are popular tools to build programs manipulating complex datastructures in a safe yet efficient manner. On top of its safety advantages, compilation techniques can turn pattern matching into highly efficient deconstruction code for immutable use cases. Conversely, high-performance datastructures and languages prefer to leverage (controlled) mutations to maximize time and memory efficiency. Algebraic data types provide a natural framework to efficiently describe in-place transformations as rewrite rules. Such representation could take advantage of parallelism opportunities that appear in tree-like structures.