> defunctionalization refers to a compile-time transformation which eliminates higher-order functions, replacing them by a single first-order apply function.
The author has indicated that this blog post was an internal communique which escaped confinement, so this isn't intended as criticism:
For a general audience, linking the first instance of the string "defunctionalization" to this Wikipedia article would help people get up to speed. I'm not embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of it, and as a consequence I'm learning more from the Wiki than I learned from the Fine Article.
It didn't exactly escape confinement; rather, I originally wrote much of this content for internal purposes and then realised it would be good to publish it externally.
True, since I linked "closure" I should probably have linked the main topic of the article. Honestly, though, I'm not sure the Wikipedia article is very comprehensible at all; I'm hoping mine is more so.
I was left wondering if the topic is inherently that difficult or if this is just another case of le Wik being kinda dense for maths and comp sci. Looking around a bit at other links in this thread, I'm gathering it's the latter.
The very origin of defunctionalization is to emulate higher-order functions in a language without them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defunctionalization
> defunctionalization refers to a compile-time transformation which eliminates higher-order functions, replacing them by a single first-order apply function.