[Haskell-cafe] Something like optimistic evaluation

[Daniil Elovkov]

Hello

Somewhat on the topic of optimistic evaluation, I've just thought of 
another way to evaluate thunks.

When the program is about to block on some IO, what if we start a thread 
to evaluate (any) unevaluated thunks. We'll have additional system 
thread, but the blocked one will not actually consume any processor time.

This would take place only when the program is compiled as threaded and 
run with -N k, k>1.

The RTS knows at least about some operations that will block, those 
which IO operations are implemented with. for example. It could merely 
start a process of evaluating any (or something more clever) outstanding 
thunks right before going into one of those operations and stop it when 
it's back.

Of course, it's not like optimistic evaluation because we don't avoid 
creating thunks. But in a sense it's similar. It could also be compared 
with incremental garbage collection :)

Has something like that been done, discussed?