Unboxed types for OCaml
summary
Proposal adds unboxed types to OCaml to eliminate pointer boxing and heavy allocation (example: a pair of 32-bit ints on 64-bit needing many words and indirections), provides a layout lattice (value, immediate, float) and rules that stop polymorphism where GC safety would break, supplies box/unbox helpers, and ships a proof‑of‑concept implementation against OCaml 4.11 plus an RFC and unification algorithm; several layout inference choices remain open.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to unboxed types
- 0:59Performance and memory issues
- 4:01The unboxing approach
- 5:57Polymorphism and safety
- 7:31The layout system
- 11:08Layout inference design
- 14:31Integration and implementation
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