Revert a CAF?

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

GHCi does this somehow, so it's definitely possible; Simon M will know.

|  -----Original Message-----
|  From: glasgow-haskell-users-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:glasgow-haskell-users-
|  bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of wren ng thornton
|  Sent: 06 December 2011 17:49
|  To: GHC-users List
|  Subject: Revert a CAF?
|  
|  So, I have an optimization/internals question. Does the GHC API have any
|  hooks for being able to revert a CAF to the original expression, thus
|  discarding the previously computed result?
|  
|  The reason I'm wanting this is that I have a particular CAF which is an
|  infinite list. Unfolding that list takes a fair deal of work, so we want
|  to share it whenever possible; however it doesn't take an overwhelming
|  amount of work, so if we know we've evaluated more of the list than
|  necessary (for a long while), it'd be nice to be able to revert the
|  evaluation in order to save on memory overhead (e.g., by calling relax
|  :: IO()).
|  
|  I could hack something together based on unsafePerformIO and top-level
|  IORefs, and it's clear that this is in fact a safe thing to do, but I'm
|  worried about the semantic issues inherent in unsafePerformIOed
|  top-level IORefs (e.g., the fact that their scope isn't particularly
|  well defined: is it per library instance? per runtime?...).
|  Unfortunately, for what I'm doing, it isn't really feasible to just
|  leave the IO type in there nor to pass around the infinite list so we
|  can use scoping rules to decide when to free it.
|  
|  (Feel free to offer alternative suggestions to handling this situation too.)
|  
|  --
|  Live well,
|  ~wren
|  
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