Why GADTs matter for performance (2015)

When GADTs (Generalized Algebraic Data Types) landed in OCaml, I wasn’t particularly happy about it. I assumed that it was the kind of nonsense you get when you let compiler writers design your programming language. Which is to say that the standard GADT examples all seem to be about the kinds of things that compiler writers do, like embed domain-specific languages or build typed abstract-syntax trees. But it didn’t seem particularly relevant for the kind of systems programming that I think about. But it became apparent pretty quickly that I was wrong. In particular, since GADTs have landed, at Jane Street we’ve found lots of examples where GADTs are important for performance, of all things. The theme in these examples is that GADTs enable you to tweak your memory representations in ways that would otherwise be painful or impossible to do safely in OCaml. The Problem of Polymorphism I’d like to walk through a simple example that illustrates this aspect of GADTs, but first, a few wo ... Read full article.