The existing simple mechanism for avoiding infinite generic specialization loops is based on checking the structural depth and width of types passed as generic type parameters. If the depth or the width of a type is above a certain threshold, the type is considered too complex for generic specialization and no specialization is produced. While this approach prevents the possibility of producing an infinite number of generic specializations for ever-growing generic type parameters, it catches the issue too late in some cases, leading to excessive CPU and memory usage.
Therefore, the new method tries to solve the problem at its root. An infinite generic specialization loop can be triggered by specializing a given generic call-site if and only if:
- Doing so would result in a loop inside the specialization graph represented by the `GenericSpecializationInformations`, i.e. it would produce direct or indirect recursion involving a generic call
- The substitutions used by the current generic call-site are structurally more complex than the substitutions used by the same call-site in the previous iteration inside specialization graph. More complex in this context means that the new generic type parameter structurally contains the generic type parameter from a previous iteration inside the specialization graph and has greater structural depth, e.g. `Array<Int>` is more complex than `Int`.
The generic specializer now records all the required information about specializations it produces and uses it later to detect and prevent any generic specializations which would result in an infinite specialization loop. It detects them as early as possible and thus reduces compile times, memory consumption and potentially also reduces the code-size by not generating useless specializations.
