Wadler space leak

[Duncan Coutts]

On 8 November 2010 13:28, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There's another approach in Jan Sparud's paper here:
>
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=165196
>
> although it's not clear that this interacts very well with inlining either,
> and it has a suspicious-looking side-effecting operation.  It also looks
> like it creates a circular reference between the thunk and the selectors,
> which might hinder optimisations, and would probably also make things slower
> (by adding extra free variables to the thunk).

This proposal is mentioned favourably by Jörgen Gustavsson David Sands
in [1] (see section 6, case study 6). They mention that there is a
formalisation in Gustavsson's thesis [2]. That may say something about
inlining, since that's just the kind of transformation they'd want to
show is a space improvement.

[1]: Possibilities and Limitations of Call-by-Need Space Improvement (2001)
      http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.8.4097

[2]: Space-Safe Transformations and Usage Analysis for Call-by-Need
Languages (2001)
      (which I cannot immediately find online)

Duncan