Option in TFA to annotate inferred method return types, local variable types

[mkustermann]

It seems TFA annotates

• parameter variables of procedures with their incoming argument type (vm.inferred-arg-type.metadata)
• fields with the inferred type (vm.inferred-type.metadata)
• captured local variables with inferred type (vm.inferred-type.metadata)
• procedures with unboxing info (vm.unboxing-info.metadata)
• ... (e.g. result of calls)

This is very much tailored to the VM (e.g. calling convention selection only needs unboxing information because in VM we only have to decide whether parameters/returns are tagged or unboxed primitives).

To make TFA work better for other backends it would be nice to have an option that allows annotating

• all VariableDeclarations with inferred types (not just captured variables)
• all procedures with inferred result type (not just unboxing information)

/cc @alexmarkov

[a-siva]

@mkustermann how critical is this in terms of priority ?

[mkustermann]

@mkustermann how critical is this in terms of priority ?

It's an optimization opportunity - so similar to other optimizations.

If it's easy to do I'd prefer we just do it now. If it requires significant work, then it's fine to do in future.

[mkustermann]

I'll have a look at annotating the procedure return values as this is the most important atm.

[mkustermann]

I've implemented part of this (TFA annotating inferred return types) and we have a somewhat workaround for local variables not having the inferred type, so I'll close this for now.