The Revenge of Finalizers

[Malcolm Wallace]

Alastair Reid <alastair at reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk> writes:

> > Do we /want/ a blackhole?

> A blackhole would be wrong semantically because:
> - blackholes mean that a value depends on itself - that isn't true here

Agreed.  The usual operational discovery of a blackhole in a
non-threaded system is exactly when the mutator is attempting to
evaluate a node that is already under evaluation.  Since the finaliser
is essentially a separate thread, that simple operational understanding
no longer points definitively to a blackhole.

> - changing evaluation order shouldn't change whether the program
>   produces an answer or what answer it produces

Apart from possibly changing the order of any side-effects, yes.

> btw What abstract machine is NHC based on?  Given its Swedish origins,
> I expect it's a slightly modified G machine?

Exactly so.  The paper "nhc - a space-efficient Haskell compiler"
in Niklas's thesis (also presented at IFL94, ICFP95) mentions that
it is a very basic G machine, based on the SimonPJ implementation
book (1987).  Since then, we've made a few tweaks for performance,
but no major changes to the model.

> The problem is that the G-machine
> optimizes away some of the updates which make sure that the heap is
> always in a consistent state in a pure graph-reduction system.

A pure G-machine updates all redexes, but the STG-machine only updates
/shared/ redexes, yes?

Regards,
    Malcolm