17. Limitations & Performance Trade-offs

Docs / Considerations

17. Limitations & Performance Trade-offs

Dryad is designed for scripting, automation, prototyping, and small-to-medium applications. It is not intended for computationally intensive workloads, hard real-time systems, or performance-critical production pipelines — at least not until the AOT compiler matures. Below are the current known limitations and design trade-offs.

Limitation	Impact	Mitigation / Future Work
Interpreter speed	Slower than compiled languages for CPU-heavy work	Use bytecode VM (set_compile_mode(true)) or AOT compilation.
Dynamic typing	No compile-time type error detection	Opt-in 'use strict types' mode enables static validation in AOT.
FFI complexity	Complex types passed as opaque pointers	Stick to primitives across the FFI boundary; wrappers in Dryad.
Single-threaded interpreter	Base interpreter runs on one thread	thread functions run on real OS threads; they are isolated.
Module versioning	No built-in package manager yet	Manual path management; package manager is on the roadmap.
AOT experimental	Not all language features supported	Use interpreter/bytecode for development; AOT for stable hot paths.
Deep call stacks	Stack overflow risk with unbounded recursion	Prefer iterative patterns; set explicit recursion limits.
Frequent GC pressure	Large array operations trigger collections	Use buffers for raw data; minimize object allocations in loops.

When Not to Use Dryad (Current State)

 1 // ❌ Heavy numeric computation (prefer AOT or native code)
 2 // Fibonacci(40) in the AST interpreter is ~10x slower than native
 3 function fib(n) {
 4   if (n <= 1) return n;
 5   return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2); // deep recursion is slow
 6 }
 7 
 8 // ✅ Automation and orchestration (where Dryad shines)
 9 #io
10 function deploy() {
11   let config = io_read_file("deploy.json");
12   let result = run_health_checks(config);
13   io_write_file("status.log", result);
14 }
15 
16 // ✅ Rapid prototyping with FFI
17 #math
18 let result = #math::clamp(value, 0, 100);

Use the AST interpreter for scripting and prototyping. Switch to bytecode mode for better performance. Reserve AOT for production builds when the backend stabilizes.

Found an error in the spec? Open a PR.
Official Version: 1.0 · May 2026