The compiler makes an enormous number of copies of vectors and strings

[pcwalton]

We should go through and eliminate all of them. This is not hard, but will be quite time consuming.

I suspect a large part of the reason the compiler is slow is due to this.

[graydon]

Hanging the general "too many copies in the front-end" bugs off this (including copies of vecs and a few other AST node types). I suspect the solutions are all closely related.

[msullivan]

Do we know how to fix them? I feel like the obvious approach is putting more vectors and strings behind @ pointers (or actually trying to use our @-vectors), but we seem to be wanting to remove a lot of support for that...

[pnkfelix]

Visiting for bug triage, email 2013-08-12.

There's of course also the approach of maintaining intern vector/string pools and passing around indices into the pools.