Strictness annotations on type parameters

[Mario Blazevic]

    I spent several days last week trying to track a cause of a 100% 
slowdown after some trivial changes I made. The profiler didn't show any 
slowdown, presumably because it was dependent on optimizations, so I had 
to revert to tweak-run-measure cycle.

    It turned out the slowdown was caused by some unevaluated thunks 
that were kept around in long-lived IORefs. This is not the first time I 
was bitten by too laziness, either. What made things worse this time is 
that there is no way do declare the following:

data Label = LabelRef {labelId:: !Unique,
                       reference:: (IORef !LabelState), -- illegal
                       origin:: Maybe !Label}           -- illegal


    No container data type can be annotated as strict. That means I have 
to pepper my code with explicit evaluations to HNF before every 
writeIORef (reference label):

newState `seq` writeIORef (reference label) newState

    What is the reason for this restriction on where strictness 
annotations can appear? Is it purely an implementation problem or is 
there a reason emanating from Haskell design? If former, how hard would 
it be to fix?