Programming with Regions in the MLKit: Updated Manual
The technical report Programming with Regions in the MLKit is now available in a revised edition for MLKit 4.7.16, written with Mads Tofte, Lars Birkedal, Niels Hallenberg, Tommy Højfeld Olesen, and Peter Sestoft.
Compared with the previous listed edition, 4.7.2, this report adds explanations of double-ended bit-stealing, which gives many algebraic data types more compact representations, and deep argument flattening, which passes nested function arguments unboxed and works across compilation units. It also documents improved automatic conversions in the C interface and clearer printing of intermediate programs.
The version history additionally records fork-join parallelism and ReML’s explicit regions and effects, while noting that those features are not covered in detail in this manual. Chapter 20 summarises the changes; the rest of the report remains a practical guide to region-based memory management, program representations, and profiling.