Flix (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:39, 21 April 2024

Revision as of 18:11, 22 June 2024

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Monomorphization avoids [[Value type and reference type|boxing]] of primitive values at the cost of longer compilation times and larger executable binaries. Flix has some support for interoperability with programs written in [[Java programming language|Java]].<ref>{{cite web |title=Programming Flix - Interoperability |url=https://doc.flix.dev/interoperability/ |website=flix.dev}}</ref>

Flix supports [[tail call elimination]] which ensures that function calls in tail position never consume stack space and hence cannot cause the call stack to overflow.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Madsen |first1=Magnus |last2=Zarifi |first2=Ramin |last3=Lhoták |first3=Ondřej |title=Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Compiler Construction |chapter=Tail call elimination and data representation for functional languages on the Java virtual machine |date=2018 |pages=139–150 |doi=10.1145/3178372.3179499|isbn=9781450356442 |s2cid=3432962 }}</ref> Since the [[Java bytecode instruction listings|JVM instruction set]] lacks explicit support for tail calls, such calls are emulated using a form of reusable stack frames.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Tauber |first1=Tomáš |last2=Bi |first2=Xuan |last3=Shi |first3=Zhiyuan |last4=Zhang |first4=Weixin |last5=Li |first5=Huang |last6=Zhang |first6=Zhenrui |last7=Oliveira |first7=Bruno C. D. S. |titlechapter=Memory-Efficient Tail Calls in the JVM with Imperative Functional Objects |journaltitle=Programming Languages and Systems |series=Lecture Notes in Computer Science |date=2015 |volume=9458 |pages=11–28 |doi=10.1007/978-3-319-26529-2_2|isbn=978-3-319-26528-5 }}</ref> Support for tail call elimination is important since all iteration in Flix is expressed through [[recursion]].

The Flix compiler disallows most forms of unused or redundant code, including: unused local variables, unused functions, unused formal parameters, unused type parameters, and unused type declarations, such unused constructs are reported as compiler errors.<ref>{{cite web |title=Redundancies as Compile-Time Errors |url=https://flix.dev/blog/redundancies-as-compile-time-errors/ |website=flix.dev}}</ref> [[Variable shadowing]] is also disallowed. The stated rationale is that unused or redundant code is often correlated with erroneous code<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Engler |first1=D. |title=Using redundancies to find errors |journal=IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering |date=October 2003 |volume=29 |issue=10 |pages=915–928 |doi=10.1109/TSE.2003.1237172}}</ref>