High-order Virtual Machine (HVM): Massively parallel, optimal functional runtime
Author here.<p>HVM is the ultimate conclusion to years of optimal evaluation research. I&#x27;ve been a great enthusiast of optimal runtimes. Until now, though, my most efficient implementation had barely passed 50 million rewrites per second. It did beat GHC in cases where optimality helped, like λ-encoded arithmetic, but in more real-world scenarios, it was still far behind. Thanks to a recent memory layout breakthrough, though, we managed to reach a peak performance of <i>2.5 billion</i> rewrites per second, on the same machine. That&#x27;s a ridiculous 50x improvement.<p>That is enough for it to enjoy roughly the same performance of GHC in normal programs, and even outperform it when automatic parallelism kicks in, if that counts! Of course, there are still cases where it will perform worse (by 2x at most usually, and some weird quadratic cases that should be fixed [see issues]), but remember it is a 1-month prototype versus the largest lazy functional compiler in the market. I&#x27;m confident HVM&#x27;s current design is able to scale and become the fastest functional runtime in the world, because I believe the optimal algorithm is inherently superior.<p>I&#x27;m looking for partners! Check the notes at the end of the repository&#x27;s README if you want to get involved.