Arrows and GHC rewrite rules

Eric Cheng ericc at alumni.rice.edu
Thu Mar 29 22:34:58 EDT 2007


In GHC's Control.Arrow implementation, there are several rewrite rules
which exploit some properties of arrows.  For example,

> "compose/arr"	forall f g . arr f >>> arr g = arr (f >>> g)
> "first/arr"	forall f . first (arr f) = arr (first f)
> "second/arr"	forall f . second (arr f) = arr (second f)

... and so forth.

Now say I have a simple arrow instance:

> newtype SF a b = SF ([a] -> [b])
>
> instance Arrow SF where
>    arr f = SF (map f)
>
>    first (SF f) = SF g
>       where g l = let (x, y) = unzip l
>                    in zip (f x) y
>
>    (SF f) >>> (SF g) = SF (g . f)

and some arrow composition:

> foo :: SF (Int,Int) (Int,Int)
> foo = first (arr (+1)) >>> first (arr (+2) >>> arr (+3))

I was expecting that ghc would at least make use of compose/arr or
even first/arr, but it didn't appear to be the case.  I was using
ghc-6.6, and -ddump-simpl-stats showed a bunch of list-specific rules
were fired (map, mapFB, fold/build, etc), but I did not see any
arrow-related rules being applied.

Were the rewrite rules subsumed by inlining or beta-reduction?  Am I
missing something here?

Thanks,
Eric


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