Question

I was reading about Deterministic Execution, which is that for the same input, you have the same output. I was wondering whether any compiler writer has thought about optimizing deterministic functions at runtime.
For example, take the factorial function. If at runtime, it is detected that it is continuously being called with the same input value, the compiler can cache the output value and instead of executing the factorial function, can directly use that output value. Seems like a nice research topic. Are there any papers or work on this topic?

Answer 1

This is usually called memoization, and is a fairly common optimization in functional languages.