Daml Primitive

Questions
1

Hi Team,

I curious to understand what happens under the hood when Daml executes such statements involving primitive from the GHC, such as :

import GHC.Types (primitive)

explode : Text -> [Text]
explode = primitive @"BEExplodeText"

Also, is there a performance impact or benefit of calling such lower level primitive functions ?

Thanks in advance!
Brian

2

In our implementation of the Daml-LF runtime, for example, BEExplodeText lands here.

Executing hand-written Scala code is faster than evaluating Daml-LF expressions. However, this style of primitive implementation essentially places a barrier that prevents tail-call optimization across that barrier, making primitives poor candidates for higher-order functions, though we have permitted some exceptions as a compromise, each requiring some complicated special-casing in the interpreter in order to avoid this problem.

If you mean “is there a performance benefit to using primitive directly instead of invoking this explode function”, no, there isn’t.

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