[pro] Meaning of "inline" when applied to a generic function?

[Matthew Mondor]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2014 10:12:18 -0700
Steve Haflich <shaflich at gmail.com> wrote:

> But Dylan had one really great potential feature CL lacks:  It has
> protocols for declaring a class tree of a gf to be sealed.  That was a
> promise that these entities would never after be modified, which include
> extensions!  Once a bunch of stuff has been sealed, a "block compiler"
> could in principle (and probably also in practice) walk over an entire
> application and do lots of inlining and degenerifying of function calls,
> without changing the semantics of a correctly-declared program.  Sealing is
> something I would like to have seen added to CL, but machines are so fast
> these days that inlining and degenerifying aren't what the Lisp market is
> concerned about these days.

This reminds me that ECL has some support for sealing classes, although
I've not tried the feature and am not familiar with its implementation
details or its optimization capabilities.
-- 
Matt