base package (Was: GHC 7.8 release?)

[Edward Kmett]

Comparing hash, ptr, str gives you a pretty good acceptance/rejection test.
hash for the quick rejection, ptr for quick acceptance, str for accuracy.
Especially since the particular fingerprints for Typeable at least are
usually made up of 3 bytestrings that were just stuffed in and forgotten
about.

That said, this would seem to bring ByteString or at least Ptr in at a
pretty low level for the level of generality folks seem to be suddenly
seeking.

-Edward

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Ian Lynagh <ian at well-typed.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 02:45:19PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> >
> > Remember that fingerprinting is not hashing.  For fingerprinting we
> > need to have a realistic expectation of no collisions.  I don't
> > think FNV is suitable.
> >
> > I'm sure it would be possible to replace the C md5 code with some
> > Haskell.  Performance *is* important here though - Typeable is in
> > the inner loop of certain generic programming libraries, like SYB.
>
> We currently just compare
>     hash(str)
> for equality, right? Could we instead compare
>     (hash str, str)
> ? That would be even more correct, even if a bad/cheap hash function is
> used, and would only be slower for the case where the types match
> (unless you're unlucky and get a hash collision).
>
> In fact, we may be able to arrange it so that in the equal case the
> strings are normally exactly the same string, so we can do a cheap
> pointer equality test (like ByteString already does) to make the equal
> case fast too (falling back to actually checking the strings are equal,
> if they aren't the same string).
>
>
> Thanks
> Ian
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
> Glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/attachments/20130221/1cdbb109/attachment.htm>