[Haskell-cafe] Optimistic evaluation

[Don Stewart]

andrewcoppin:
> Hi folks.
> 
> I just read a rather interesting paper about a fork of GHC that performs 
> "optimistic evaluation". This shows big wins in some cases.
> 
> The authors claim to have implemented this in a fork of GHC and promised 
> that it would be integrated into the production compiler "in the near 
> future". Curios, I investigated the GHC wiki...
> 
> Well, let's see now. The front page has links to "out release plans for 
> 6.8.3" and "what will be in 6.10". The latter page,
> 
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/Releases
> 
> mentions that a beta has just been released... and seems oblivious to 
> the fact that 6.10.1 is production now. Clearly, any hopes I might have 
> had of getting a handle on the current status of GHC from this wiki were 
> dashed somewhat. ;-)
> 
> Does anybody have any suggestions for a more reliable way of figuring 
> out what the current activities and plans for GHC are?

I'm assuming you're talking about the 'eager evaluation' papers? (There
were a few). I think the verdict was that the runtime machinery was
too complex for the performance gain.

-- Don