TIL: A Type-Directed Optimizing Compiler for ML.
David Tarditi, C. Addison Stone, Greg Morrisett, Robert W. Harper, Perry C. Cheng · 1996
The goal of the TIL project was to explore the use of Typed Intermediate Languages to produce high-performance native code from Standard ML (SML). We believed that existing SML compilers were doing a good job of conventional functional language optimizations, as one might find in a LISP compiler, but that inadequate use was made of the rich type information present in the source language. Our goal was to show that we could get much greater performance by propagating type information through to the back end of the compiler, without sacrificing the advantages a#orded by loop-oriented and other optimizations.