Ah thanks! I didn't find that paper, is it online somewhere?
You may also be interested in the stack allocation system in OCaml: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGRn5ZIbEW8 In particular, Stephen gives a nice example in the end how it can avoid some allocations of lambdas (but it also would need to box the closure in the CPS-reverse).
You may also be interested in
Jeffrey M. Bell, Françoise Bellegarde, and James Hook. “Type-Driven Defunctionalization,” ICFP ’97, . Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 25–37. 1997. doi:10.1145/258948.258953.
and
Andrew Tolmach, and Dino P Oliva. “From ML to Ada: Strongly-Typed Language Interoperability via Source Translation.” Journal of Functional Programming 8 (4). Cambridge University Press: 367–412. 1998.
who thought about whole-program-defunctionalization before.
The manuscript is currently unpublished so it’s not available ):
Thanks for the links - I’ve seen them, and it’s interesting that defunctionalization is usually an optimization. The “Type-driven …” paper is the earliest work I’m aware of that does it over surface types, but doesnt “go all the way”.
Id love to chat more - a link to email can be found around the post, including at the bottom.
You may also be interested in the stack allocation system in OCaml: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGRn5ZIbEW8 In particular, Stephen gives a nice example in the end how it can avoid some allocations of lambdas (but it also would need to box the closure in the CPS-reverse).
You may also be interested in
and who thought about whole-program-defunctionalization before.