[Haskell] Expecting more inlining for bit shifting

[roconnor at theorem.ca]

>> Okay, when I force inlining for shift, (and I even need to do it for
>> shiftR!) then the code is inlined in C.  However this isn't the behaviour I
>> want. Ideally the inlining should only happen when/because the second
>> argument of shift is constant and the system knows that it can evaluate the
>> case analysis away and that makes the function small.
>>
>> Am I being too naive on what to expect from my complier or is this
>> reasonable?
>
> It might be possible, but it sounds tricky. I guess it would have to go
> something like "try inlining this, run the simplifier, see if it got
> small enough, if not back out", which could waste a lot of work if it
> fails in lots of cases.

I would have imagined an optimisation step that only activates when a 
constructor is passed into a function to see if it produces a branch that 
can be precomputed, and then tries to determine if it is worth making a 
specialized function with that case eliminated.  Or possibly having each 
function inspected to see if it has branches that could be eliminated if a 
constructor was passed as an argument.

I must say I'm extremely disappointed with this.  I believe I was taught 
in my undergraduate CS program (but perhaps I wasn't) that one ought not 
to make these sorts of trivial hand optimisations, because compilers are 
smart enough to figure out these sorts of things by themselves, and they 
know more about that target platform that you do.  In particular the 
propaganda about side-effect-free functional languages was a promise that 
they would use the strong types and side-effect-freeness to do all sorts 
of wonderful optimisations.

However, it seems the truth of the matter is that an advanced compiler 
such as GHC cannot even optimise away the bounds checks occurring when 
shifting by a constant number of bits.

-- 
Russell O'Connor                                      <http://r6.ca/>
``All talk about `theft,''' the general counsel of the American Graphophone
Company wrote, ``is the merest claptrap, for there exists no property in
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