whats the current state of runtime rep for ghc 8 onwards?

Richard Eisenberg eir at cis.upenn.edu
Tue Apr 5 07:44:39 UTC 2016


Yes, that's correct. The RuntimeRep story generally allows for such polymorphism in the future, but it's not implemented yet. One concern is that doing this would require RuntimeRep to look like

> data Levity = Lifted | Unlifted
> data RuntimeRep = PtrRep Levity | IntRep | VoidRep | ...

The problem here is that, in the vastly common case of kind *, this requires an extra indirection. I actually implemented this, and indeed the performance of GHC decreased. Given that we have no way, yet, to take advantage of the kind of polymorphism you seek, I flattened the structure of RuntimeRep in order to get a modest but consistent performance boost.

So I'm, personally, very open to this direction of travel, but we have to work out both how the polymorphism should work and how to implement this without degrading performance.

Richard

On Apr 5, 2016, at 2:54 AM, Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:

> i was reading https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/NoSubKinds
> and looking at some of the applicable code, and it looks like i can't quantify over ptr-y heap values that may or may not be lifted, at least with the current state of play, is this correct?
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