[plt-scheme] Native code generation and immutable pairs

--- Lauri Alanko <la at iki.fi> wrote:

> What's so horrible about mutable cons cells, anyway? They
> are just
> two-element structures. Do you want to make structures
> immutable as
> well?

In the presence of mutation analysis becomes harder,
therefore optimisation is harder.  Whether any of these
optimisations are actually performed by any compiler is a
different story.

In the presence of mutation message passing concurrency
requires data be copied, which is rather expensive.  This
is one reason why Erlang forbids mutation.

N.

Email: noelwelsh <at> yahoo <dot> com   noel <at> untyped <dot> com
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