effectfully

The docs [here](https://github.com/IntersectMBO/plutus/blob/42d08e08aada0b53429d146910ae05ccd6a2b7f2/plutus-core/cost-model/budgeting-bench/Benchmarks/Strings.hs#L15) seem to be quite outdated, `Text` is now UTF-8 [based](https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/rnssrw/text20_with_utf8_is_finally_released) rather than UTF-16. Maybe there's something else there that needs to be updated as well.

Evaluating an AST node costs too much MEM?

5

@nau [reported](https://x.com/atlanter/status/1846574231636656407) some stats and they suggest that evaluating AST nodes consumes 96.66% of MEM, which is an absurdly huge amount compared to the 3.34% that builtins consume. Does it...

[Epic] AST and codegen optimizations

3

This issue is for dumping all the plans regarding AST optimizations (such as case-of-case, case-of-known-constructors etc) in a largely unstructured way. We'll have separate messages for Plutus Core and Plutus...

I've been told before that performance of the evaluator wasn't considered a priority, so after some initial [work](https://github.com/IntersectMBO/plutus/issues/4306#issuecomment-1058221539) I personally largely stopped pursuing optimization and have never touched [these](https://github.com/IntersectMBO/plutus/issues/5955) ideas...

Allow `force` on anything and/or give up forcing builtins

2

**Michele | Harmonic** [reported](https://x.com/MicheleHarmonic/status/1845808985917563110) on X: > allow force frames during evaluation to accept any return value, not only delayed and builtins > > so that stuff like > >...

Add `IfThenElse` to the AST

3

Alex Nemish [reports](https://x.com/atlanter/status/1846158276917899676) on X: > Validators are glorified IfThenElses. > Blockchain space is very expensive. > > IfThenElse is one of the most used builtins. > > Minswap contract...

Cheaper decoding of scripts

3

@colll78 reports on Slack: > People don’t really care much for compression onchain. The cost of bytes is so low that developers would much rather pay a large min Ada...

Currently we use the Z combinator for singly recursive functions and [this](https://github.com/IntersectMBO/plutus/blob/96d2c3b3992298a403767cde4dc12767854e302f/doc/notes/fomega/mutual-term-level-recursion/FixN.agda) for mutually recursive functions, but this is really inefficient. Adding `fix` to the AST to handle at least...

Once pattern matching builtins land (see [this](https://github.com/IntersectMBO/plutus/pull/6530) for a detailed description) we'll be able to return an iterated application from a builtin. Unfortunately, that still doesn't enable us to have...

[Builtins] Make all builtins strict

4

I was investigating a weird behavior of a test and this is where it led me to. This PR is gonna be blocked by broken benchmarking though, but we really...