Why are so few things @specialized in Scala's standard library?

Question

I've searched for the use of @specialized in the source code of the standard library of Scala 2.8.1. It looks like only a handful of traits and classes use this annotation: Function0, Function1, Function2, Tuple1, Tuple2, Product1, Product2, AbstractFunction0, AbstractFunction1, AbstractFunction2.

None of the collection classes are @specialized. Why not? Would this generate too many classes?

This means that using collection classes with primitive types is very inefficient, because there will be a lot of unnecessary boxing and unboxing going on.

What's the most efficient way to have an immutable list or sequence (with IndexedSeq characteristics) of Ints, avoiding boxing and unboxing?

Answer 1

Specialization has a high cost on the size of classes, so it must be added with careful consideration. In the particular case of collections, I imagine the impact will be huge.

Still, it is an on-going effort -- Scala library has barely started to be specialized.

Answer 2

Specialized can be expensive ( exponential ) in both size of classes and compile time. Its not just the size like the accepted answer says.

Open your scala REPL and type this.

import scala.{specialized => sp}
trait S1[@sp A, @sp B, @sp C, @sp D] { def f(p1:A): Unit }

Sorry :-). Its like a compiler bomb.

Now, lets take a simple trait

trait Foo[Int]{ }

The above will result in two compiled classes. Foo, the pure interface and Foo$1, the class implementation.

Now,

trait Foo[@specialized A] { }

A specialized template parameter here gets expanded/rewritten for 9 different primitive types ( void, boolean, byte, char, int, long, short, double, float ). So, basically you end up with 20 classes instead of 2.

Going back to the trait with 5 specialized template parameters, the classes get generated for every combination of possible primitive types. i.e its exponential in complexity.

2 * 10 ^ ^{(no of specialized parameters)}

If you are defining a class for a specific primitive type, you should be more explicit about it such as

trait Foo[@specialized(Int) A, @specialized(Int,Double) B] { }

Understandably one has to be frugal using specialized when building general purpose libraries.

Here is Paul Phillips ranting about it.

Answer 3

Partial answer to my own question: I can wrap an array in an IndexedSeq like this:

import scala.collection.immutable.IndexedSeq

def arrayToIndexedSeq[@specialized(Int) T](array: Array[T]): IndexedSeq[T] = new IndexedSeq[T] {
  def apply(idx: Int): T = array(idx)
  def length: Int = array.length
}

(Ofcourse you could still modify the contents if you have access to the underlying array, but I would make sure that the array isn't passed to other parts of my program).