Generic monomorphization

[mattiadg]

I read today this article about how generics in Go are slower than "normal" functions, and how the author needed to duplicate code in the hotpath to squeeze out more performance, unlike languages such as C++ and Rust with their "zero-cost abstractions".
One of the problems he sees, is that Go lacks a way to annotate functions as inline or that they should be made non-generic for performance reason.
One advantage of Lisette is that it is in practice a code generator and it could introduce those things, since it would mostly mean to generate more Go code. This would add to Lisette's benefits, also faster code than the one written by hand directly in Go.

[ivov]

Thanks for sharing :)

In theory, if the need ever arises, most of the pieces for #[specialize] are already in place, but #[inline] would be a much heavier lift in the emitter. The ceiling for either is matching hand-written specialized Go (rather than beating it) but recovering the dispatch and allocation costs without giving up the abstraction would still be useful. As far as I know there is no language-level reason Go cannot monomorphize aggressively, only a compile-time trade the Go team has made.