Enso Compiler Improvements

[iamrecursion]

Summary

Although the Enso runtime now has a compiler front-end, that front-end is very much a stopgap solution that needs to be evolved to support much of the functionality planned for the future. This Epic exists to track tasks that deal with improving the compiler functionality of the Enso engine.

The core of the compiler is the Core language, a simplified and restricted form of Enso that is represented as a graph. This graph representation is far more amenable to analysis and transformation, and has robust support for other features such as typechecking.

Value

These are miscellaneous improvements and will encompass things that improve performance to things that improve the API and everything in between.

Specification

• Implement a translation from AST to Core and Core to the current IR type (Implement AST to Core Translation #531, Implement Core to AstExpression Translation #530).
• Implement a translation from Core to Node using the current compiler machinery (Implement Core to Truffle Node Generation #526).
• Graph and Core improvements to support desugaring (Add removeComponent to the Graph Library #512, Add Higher-Level Component Deletion to Core #511, Implement a replaceChild Function for Core #510, Implement a replaceNode Function for Core #509, Implement the deleteSubgraph Function for Core #508).
• Optimisations for recursion (Constant Memory Accumulator Optimisation #550, Guarded Tail Call Optimisation #533, Trampolining #527, Implement Simple Tail-Call Analysis and Recognition #525, Improve Corecursion and Higher-Level Corecursion Performance #547).
• Core usability improvements (Graphviz Output for Core #529, Utilities for Copying of (Sub)graphs in Core #528), need to look at the TODO comments in the core codebase as there are more not yet filed as issues.
• Function-call optimisations (Optimise Non-Capturing Lambdas #582).
• Add support for format strings (Luna REPL #366).

Acceptance Criteria & Test Cases

• All enhancement tasks are getting completed and not languishing.