[Haskell] Expecting more inlining for bit shifting

[roconnor at theorem.ca]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

> That's precisely what GHC does.  My explanation before was too brief,
> sorry.  The algorithm is described in "Secrets of the GHC inliner"
> http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/Papers/inlining/index.htm
>
> But it still only makes a specialised copy if the function is "small
> enough".  Obviously a great big function with a tiny specialisation
> opportunity would be a poor candidate.

Do you mean if the resulting function if ``small enough'', or the original 
function is small enough?  Anyhow I will look at the paper.

> | 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.
>
> Well I think if you use -ddump-simpl you'll see a program that often
> looks pretty different to the one you wrote.  I often have difficulty
> figuring out just how GHC managed to transform the source program into
> the optimised one.

I should metion that I feel that GHC does do a great optimisation job 
considering.  It manages to transform a language, largely based on 
abstract mathematics, into something that a Von Neumann can run in 
practise.  This is, of course, and amasing feat.  I am just going to have 
to learn that the comipler won't do optimisations that I think it ought to 
figure out.  So I will either have to start writing hand tunned 
non-portable, potentially unsafe code, or figure out how to extend GHC 
optimizer.  I prefer the later.

-- 
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
ideas musical, literary or artistic, except as defined by statute.''