Technical Term: AST

When we set out to design the Firefly compiler for the Fidelity Framework, one of our core goals was to produce truly minimal native executables. In the world of traditional .NET development, your “Hello World” application carries the weight of the entire runtime and referenced assemblies, resulting in deployments measured in megabytes. For embedded systems, high-frequency trading platforms, or any scenario where every byte matters, this overhead is unacceptable. Our solution involves a revolutionary approach: type-aware tree shaking that operates directly on the F# Compiler Services AST, preserving rich type information to guide precise dead code elimination.

Note: This article was updated September 27, 2025, incorporating insights from recent research and a recent Richard Sutton interview that affirm many of the tenets we have put forward, including the content of this blog entry. In the world of artificial intelligence, a structural transition is underway. For more than a decade, matrix multiplication has served as the computational foundation of neural networks, powering everything from language models like ChatGPT to computer vision systems analyzing medical images.