optimistic evaluation

Frederik Eaton frederik at a5.repetae.net
Tue Feb 7 15:28:51 EST 2006


Hi all,

What is the status of Rob Ennals' optimistic evaluation work? I'm told
that it has been removed from GHC. This is extremely depressing to me. 
Without such a feature available, it becomes very difficult to write
programs that process large amounts of data in Haskell. In many such
applications, strictness annotations become not just important for
performance, but necessary to get a program to function at all. 

With optimistic evaluation, GHC and Haskell would have been at least
potential candidates for my programming work in machine learning;
without it I fear that this is no longer the case.

Will optimistic evaluation ever be present in GHC again? What is its
priority, compared to other features which are being implemented? What
was the last (if any) version of GHC with optimistic evaluation
present?

Thanks,

Frederik


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