Suneido Bind

In functional programming you have the idea of "partial application" of functions, where you supply some of the arguments to a function and the result is a new function that takes the remaining arguments. This is also referred to as "binding" some of the arguments, for example C++ std::bind.

We've had a version of this in Suneido for a long time, called "Curry". This is actually not the correct name, although it's related. Technically, currying f(a,b) would give you a function you could call as g(a)(b), where g(a) would give you a function you could call as h(b).

Suneido's Curry similarly allows you to supply some of the leading arguments, creating something you can call later with the remaining arguments. For example:

f = Curry(Print, 'hello')
f('world')
    => hello world

The code is fairly simple, using Suneido's variable number of argument facilities (similar to Javascript's spread and rest)

Recently, I was thinking that it would be nice if you could simply write: (like Scala)

f = Print('hello', _)

That would require compiler changes, but I realized I could do something similar to try out the idea:

f = Bind(Print, 'hello', Bind)

I needed something to stand for unsupplied arguments and using Bind itself seemed suitable.

To make it fast, I had the idea that I could generate a custom class. That sounds expensive, but you only need a class per "shape" of bind, not the particular values. And the classes could be cached. The code is a bit more complicated but not bad.



As hoped, the functions returned by Bind were faster than the ones from Curry, about four times faster. That was nice. And although Bind didn't handle variable numbers of arguments like Curry, it didn't require the supplied arguments to be at the beginning.

Of course, the other way to do this is using Suneido blocks (like closures or lambdas in other languages but with a syntax that came from Smalltalk):

f = {|b| Print('hello', b) }

It turned out that was slightly faster than my fancy new Bind. Which means we shouldn't be using Curry either since it's even slower. (jSuneido is even smart enough to see that's not actually a closure and optimize it to just be a normal function, avoiding the overhead of capturing the environment.)

It would still be nicer to write: Print('hello', _) but that could simply be syntactic sugar for the equivalent block. That wouldn't be too hard to implement in jSuneido since it compiles via an AST but it would be harder in cSuneido which compiles in a single pass directly from source to byte code.

Of course, if you had that, then it would also be nice to be able to write e.g. Map(2 * _) as a shorthand for: Map({|x| 2 * x })