[Haskell-cafe] Re: Properties of optimizer rule application?

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| I think I also found a typo:

Quite right, thanks -- now fixed.

| Recently I found that specialisation interacts in an unexpected way with
| explicit RULES (and with inlining). I used a function multiple times and
| this seemed to make GHC specialising this function (although I did not
| used a SPECIALISE pragma) to the particular type. But then this function
| was no longer available for fusion.

Yes, specialisation generates new RULES.  These new rules apply all the time, so they may rewrite your call to f before your fusion rules run.  This is a bad thing.  Really, specialisation should generate rules for a particular phase 'spec', and you should be able to add your fusion rules to precede or follow 'spec'.

| Also in one case declaring a function 'foo' as INLINE [0] avoided fusion
| of 'foo', where NOINLINE [0] did the fusion in phase 2. I assumed that
| these two pragmas are identical in phases before 0.

I'm not sure what is going on here

| Summarized I think it is not only required to have better control over the
| phases of the optimizer but to have a clear unifying concept of several
| kinds of program transformations, namely SPECIALISE, INLINE, RULES.

I can hardly argue with a "clear unifying concept".  But I'm not quite sure what you mean.  Here's a stab.  You could put this on the wiki and refine it with help from this end.

* SPECIALISE generates a rule
* RULES specifies a rule
* INLINE is just like a rule (lhs = rhs)

The latter two can be controlled to some extend by the "phase" mechanism.  The first should be.


Did you mean more than that?

Simon