[Haskell-cafe] Haskell maximum stack depth

[Jonathan Cast]

On 29 Jan 2008, at 1:28 AM, Neil Mitchell wrote:

> Hi Adrian,
>
>> The "bug" is in ghc stack management. Why is it so important that the
>> stack size is arbitrarily limited?
>
> It's not, but it makes some things easier and faster. A better
> question is why is it important for the stack to grow dynamically. The
> answer is that its not.
>
>> It's just an intermediate data
>> structure, no different from any other intermediate data structure
>> you may build on the heap (well apart from it's efficiency). But I  
>> guess
>> we would be in danger of having our programs run too fast if folk  
>> were
>> silly enough to make use of the stack.
>
> In C putting something on the stack is massively more efficient than
> putting it on the heap. In Haskell, there is nearly no difference, and
> I can imagine some situations where the heap is actually faster.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/45.ps is the traditional  
cite here, no?

jcc