[Haskell-cafe] I love purity, but it's killing me.

[Emil Axelsson]

I know of a few of ways to express sharing in a pure language:

1) "Observable sharing", which, in general, is unsafe.

   http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/pubs/entry-asian99-lava.html

2) Using Template Haskell

   http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/publications/PAPERS/7524/EmbedHDLinTH.ps

3) Matthew Naylor has done some work on "expressible sharing", which has 
advantages over both methods above. I don't have any reference though...

4) Use a monad (but I'm sure this is what you're trying to avoid).

/ Emil



On 2008-02-08 07:33, Tom Hawkins wrote:
> I've been programming with Haskell for a few years and love it.  One
> of my favorite applications of Haskell is using for domain specific
> languages.  However, after designing a handful of DSLs, I continue to
> hit what appears to be a fundamental hurdle -- or at least I have yet
> to find an adequate solution.
> 
> My DSLs invariably define a datatype to capture expressions; something
> like this:
> 
> data Expression
>   = Add Expression Expression
>   | Sub Expression Expression
>   | Variable String
>   | Constant Int
>   deriving Eq
> 
> Using the datatype Expression, it is easy to mass a collections of
> functions to help assemble complex expressions, which leads to very
> concise programs in the DSL.
> 
> The problem comes when I want to generate efficient code from an
> Expression (ie. to C or some other target language).  The method I use
> invovles converting the tree of subexpressions into an acyclic graphic
> to eliminate common subexpressions.  The nodes are then topologically
> ordered and assigned an instruction, or statement for each node.  For
> example:
> 
> let a = Add (Constant 10) (Variable "i1")
>     b = Sub (Variable "i2") (Constant 2)
>     c = Add a b
> 
> would compile to a C program that may look like this:
> 
>   a = 10 + i1;
>   b = i2 - 2;
>   c = a + b;
> 
> The process of converting an expression tree to a graph uses either Eq
> or Ord (either derived or a custom instance) to search and build a set
> of unique nodes to be ordered for execution.  In this case "a", then
> "b", then "c".  The problem is expressions often have shared,
> equivalent subnodes, which dramatically grows the size of the tree.
> For example:
> 
> let d = Add c c
>     e = Add d d    -- "e" now as 16 leaf nodes.
> 
> As these trees grow in size, the equality comparison in graph
> construction quickly becomes the bottleneck for DSL compilation.
> What's worse, the phase transition from tractable to intractable is
> very sharp.  In one of my DSL programs, I made a seemingly small
> change, and compilation time went from milliseconds to
> not-in-a-million-years.
> 
> Prior to Haskell, I wrote a few DSLs in OCaml.  I didn't have this
> problem in OCaml because each "let" expression was mutable, and I
> could use the physical equality operator to perform fast comparisons.
> Unfortunately, I have grown to love Haskell's type system and its lack
> of side effects, and could never go back.
> 
> Is there anything that can be done to dramatically speed up
> comparisons, or is there a better approach I can take to extract
> common subexpressions?  I should point out I have an opportunity to
> get Haskell on a real industrial application.  But if I can't solve
> this problem, I may have to resort to far less eloquent languages.
> :-(
> 
> Thanks for any and all help.
> 
> -Tom
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