presentation: Next-gen Haskell Compilation Techniques

Mon Jan 11 12:51:41 UTC 2021

I may not emphasize in the talk, but the goal of the grin compiler project is to build a compiler pipeline that allows easy experimentation of different compilation techniques. Anything between whole program compilation to per module incremental codegen. So the whole program compilation is not really a requirement but an option.
Right - but some optimisations absolutely require whole-program analysis, don't they?  I'm thinking of flow analyses that support defunctionalisation, when you must know all the lambdas that could be bound to `f` in the definition of `map` for example.

Such optimisations are powerful, but brittle because they are simply inapplicable without whole-program analysis.  Or maybe you can find ways to make them more resilient.

Simon

From: ghc-devs <ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Csaba Hruska
Sent: 11 January 2021 12:19
To: Sebastian Graf <sgraf1337 at gmail.com>
Cc: GHC developers <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: presentation: Next-gen Haskell Compilation Techniques

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for your feedback.
I know that CIB and Perceus have issues with cycles, but these systems are still in development so who knows what will be the conclusion.
I may not emphasize in the talk, but the goal of the grin compiler project is to build a compiler pipeline that allows easy experimentation of different compilation techniques. Anything between whole program compilation to per module incremental codegen. So the whole program compilation is not really a requirement but an option.

Cheers,
Csaba

On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 1:58 PM Sebastian Graf <sgraf1337 at gmail.com<mailto:sgraf1337 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi Csaba,

Thanks for your presentation, that's a nice high-level overview of what you're up to.

A few thoughts:

  *   Whole-program optimization sounds great, but also very ambitious, given the amount of code GHC generates today. I'd be amazed to see advances in that area, though, and your >100-module CFA performance incites hope!
  *   I wonder if going through GRIN results in a more efficient mapping to hardware. I recently found that the code GHC generates is dominated by administrative traffic from and to the heap [1]. I suspect that you can have big wins here if you manage to convey better call stack, heap and alias information to LLVM.
  *   The Control Analysis+specialisation approach sounds pretty similar to doing Constructor Specialisation [2] for Lambdas (cf. 6.2) if you also inline the function for which you specialise afterwards. I sunk many hours into making that work reliably, fast and without code bloat in the past, to no avail. Frankly, if you can do it in GRIN, I don't see why we couldn't do it in Core. But maybe we can learn from the GRIN implementation afterwards and maybe rethink SpecConstr. Maybe the key is not to inline the function for which we specialise? But then you don't gain that much...
  *   I follow the Counting Immutable Beans [3] stuff quite closely (Sebastian is a colleague of mine) and hope that it is applicable to Haskell some day. But I think using Perceus, like any purely RC-based memory management scheme, means that you can't have cycles in your heap, so no loopy thunks (such as constant-space `ones = 1:ones`) and mutability. I think that makes a pretty huge difference for many use cases. Sebastian also told me that they have to adapt their solutions to the cycle restriction from time to time, so far always successfully. But it comes at a cost: You have to adapt the code you want to write into a form that works.
I only read the slides, apologies if some of my points were invalidated by something you said.

Keep up the good work!
Cheers,
Sebastian

[1] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/19113<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgitlab.haskell.org%2Fghc%2Fghc%2F-%2Fissues%2F19113&data=04%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C0a889669aa404e4b938008d8b62b23f0%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637459644503167010%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=0W9ejmKCDKpuBT0mEArvIwAmHDUS4QI9kc5j%2BhGUX5I%3D&reserved=0>
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/spec-constr.pdf<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fresearch%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F07%2Fspec-constr.pdf&data=04%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C0a889669aa404e4b938008d8b62b23f0%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637459644503177005%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=8wJJXOpNuaQpjOWBTwbQ0upeOj1LLXSUD86cn8TbKI8%3D&reserved=0>
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05647<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F1908.05647&data=04%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C0a889669aa404e4b938008d8b62b23f0%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637459644503186998%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=LCFO8R5SZT0KveoB9GyPcMpwbhU9DTLOnYhxD%2FZNXxU%3D&reserved=0>

Am So., 10. Jan. 2021 um 00:31 Uhr schrieb Csaba Hruska <csaba.hruska at gmail.com<mailto:csaba.hruska at gmail.com>>:
Hello,
I did an online presentation about Haskell related (futuristic) compilation techniques.
The application of these methods is also the main motivation of my work with the grin compiler project and ghc-wpc.

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyaR8E325ok<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DjyaR8E325ok&data=04%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C0a889669aa404e4b938008d8b62b23f0%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637459644503196994%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=dbxjJKAKqZJZ2jdYE2aR6ymQIp9awCmOHwsBAHLz9AM%3D&reserved=0>
slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1g_-bHgeD7lV4AYybnvjgkWa9GKuP6QFUyd26zpqXssQ/edit?usp=sharing<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fpresentation%2Fd%2F1g_-bHgeD7lV4AYybnvjgkWa9GKuP6QFUyd26zpqXssQ%2Fedit%3Fusp%3Dsharing&data=04%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C0a889669aa404e4b938008d8b62b23f0%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637459644503196994%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=UHHOI6Nr80zuDrFDPVUz6wsNXKlxY06%2B5tG%2BCxf847I%3D&reserved=0>

Regards,
Csaba
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