Hacker News Reader

Simon Peyton Jones's "The implementation of functional programming languages" has a chapter on the "Efficient compilation of pattern matching" (chapter 5 by Philip Wadler).

https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-2up...

View on HN

Also Xavier Leroy's ZINC paper (https://xavierleroy.org/bibrefs/Leroy-ZINC.html) although I believe that's no longer the implementation used by OCaml since it got replaced by an even more efficient one.

Probably Compiling Pattern Matching to Good Decision Trees (by Luc Maranget) is the scheme used by OCaml (http://moscova.inria.fr/%7Emaranget/papers/ml05e-maranget.pd...).

It explains how to minimize the decisions trees you obtain from a match statement, so you gain a ton of efficiency over a naive implementation, especially for large, multi-column matches.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com