[racket-dev] [plt] Push #27446: master branch updated

Typed Racket has to expand into code that registers the type of each
module-top-level identifier in the global environment so that other
modules can find the types to typecheck with.  For example, this
program:

#lang typed/racket
(provide x)
(define: x : Integer 1)

expands into (greatly simplified):

#lang ...
(#%provide x)
(begin-for-syntax
  (declare #'x Integer-rep))
(define-values (x) 1)

but what is `Integer-rep`?  It needs to be an expression that
_constructs_ the internal Typed Racket representation of the `Integer`
type. Previously, that looked something like this:

    (make-Union (sort (list Negative-Fixnum-rep Positive-Fixnum-rep ...)))

and so on and so forth for the components, all the way down to base
types.  You can imagine how this gets quite large, especially for
large types.

However, this is wasteful, because every Typed Racket program, at type
checking time, defines a constant that's the representation of the
`Integer` type, right here [1]. So instead of serializing an
expression that constructs the same thing as `-Int`, we can just
*reference* `-Int` in the expanded code.  To make that possible, Typed
Racket now builds a hash table [2] mapping types (really, their
representations) to identifiers that denote those types. Then the
serializer just consults this table [3].

It turns out that base types (but no others) already used basically
this mechanism, by storing the identifier *in* the type
representation.  But that's now obsolete, and thus was removed in my
subsequent commit.

As a result, the type serialization is much smaller.

[1] https://github.com/plt/racket/blob/master/pkgs/typed-racket-pkgs/typed-racket-lib/typed-racket/types/numeric-tower.rkt#L107
[2] https://github.com/plt/racket/blob/master/pkgs/typed-racket-pkgs/typed-racket-lib/typed-racket/types/base-abbrev.rkt#L23
[3] https://github.com/plt/racket/blob/master/pkgs/typed-racket-pkgs/typed-racket-lib/typed-racket/env/init-envs.rkt#L51

On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Neil Toronto <neil.toronto at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 09/06/2013 04:14 PM, samth at racket-lang.org wrote:
>>
>> 56b372c Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at racket-lang.org> 2013-09-06 14:22
>> :
>> | Remember types that are defined, and use them in serialization.
>> |
>> | This extends a facility already available for base types,
>> | making that facility no longer strictly needed.
>> |
>> | Shrinks the zo size for the `math` package by almost 1MB.
>> :
>>    M .../typed-racket/env/init-envs.rkt                |   1 +
>>    M .../typed-racket/typecheck/def-export.rkt         |   7 +-
>>    M .../typed-racket/typecheck/tc-toplevel.rkt        |  31 +++---
>>    M .../typed-racket/types/abbrev.rkt                 |  36 +++----
>>    M .../typed-racket/types/base-abbrev.rkt            |  12 ++-
>>    M .../typed-racket/types/numeric-tower.rkt          | 108
>> +++++++++----------
>
>
> Would you mind explaining this a little more? It sounds interesting, and the
> commit almost has my name in it. :)
>
> Neil ⊥
>