[GHC] #9781: Make list monad operations fuse

[David Feuer]

Note also that there are fairly clear reasons that fusion is flakier than
many other optimizations. In particular, it requires the compiler to do
things that seem *weird*, and that in most other cases are just *bad
ideas*. At least, it requires:

1. Inlining things that look large and/or expensive. This is done in the
hope that they will fuse with other things, producing a whole that is
smaller and cheaper than the sum of its parts. It is done with the
knowledge that these things will (in most cases) be written back to smaller
cheaper forms if they don't fuse. That is, *our* knowledge of that—the
compiler has absolutely no way to know what shenanigans we're up to.

2. Refraining from floating things that look like they should be floated.
GHC likes to pull constants and such out because doing so improves sharing
and also improves other analyses. But if it pulls our producer away from
our consumer, they will not fuse. I think Simon's simplifier changes a few
months ago helped with this issue, but I don't know that it is (or can ever
be) resolved completely.
On Nov 11, 2014 11:54 AM, "David Feuer" <david.feuer at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Nov 11, 2014 6:04 AM, "Simon Peyton Jones" <simonpj at microsoft.com>
> wrote:
> > It’s true that, particularly for fusion, inlining can make a huge
> difference.  And GHC really does need help… it’s extremely hard for it to
> make the “right” choice all the time.
>
> The inliner does indeed do amazing things, and list fusion does indeed do
> lovely things for user code. It's just not the most *reliable* optimization
> in the compiler. I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting that
> and trying to avoid relying on it too heavily in *library* code. Kim-Ee was
> right that expanding out mapM by hand bloated the source. I've since
> defined `sequence=mapM id` to resolve that problem, and doing so does not
> hurt the benchmarks—it relies only on inlining id (which is quite reliable)
> and beta-reducing (which is also quite reliable).
>
> > I strongly agree with Kim-Ee that we should play the game of “optimise
> by randomly mutating the program and pick the version that (today) happens
> to run faster”.  But I don’t think David is doing that.   There is, at
> least a Note: [List comprehensions and inlining].
>
> I've been trying to leave a trail of comments and notes as I go. I may
> need to go further.
>
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