Revert a CAF?

[Twan van Laarhoven]

On 06/12/11 18:48, wren ng thornton wrote:
> 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?
>
> ...
>
> 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.

How bad is the IORef solution really? I.e. can someone more well versed 
in ghc internals tell me why this wouldn't work?

     type CAF a = IORef (() -> a, a)
     mkCAF :: (() -> a) -> a
     mkCAF f = unsafePerformIO $ newIORef (f, f ())
     getCAF :: CAF a -> a
     getCAF = snd . unsafeDupablePerformIO . readIORef
     resetCAF :: CAF a -> IO ()
     resetCAF = modifyIORef $ \(f,_) -> (f, f ())

     myCAF :: CAF [Int]
     myCAF = mkCAF $ \_ -> [1..1000000]
     {-# NOINLINE myCAF #-}


Twan