[Haskell-cafe] Re: Where do I put the seq?

Lennart Augustsson lennart at augustsson.net
Fri Aug 21 06:04:06 EDT 2009


You need a lot of magic to make the IO monad efficient.
You don't really want to pass around (and pattern match on) a
RealWorld token, that would be inefficient.


On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Peter Verswyvelen<bugfact at gmail.com> wrote:
> IO also seems to use unboxed (hence strict?) tuples
>
> newtype IO a = IO (State# RealWorld -> (# State# RealWorld, a #))
>
> Not sure if this is just for performance, but if the strictness is required,
> here we have the horrible hack again then (would behave different without
> it?). I guess it works because when applying primitive function likes
> putChar#, these could be considered as fully strict, since putChar# c really
> does force evaluation of c strictly and puts in the screen. This is
> different from the lazy IO situation, where a string is concatenated lazily,
> and put on the screen by the consumer as soon as it's available. Ah I'm
> having troubles to explain myself formally, never mind :)
> Actually RealWorld is not defined in that file, it is defined here, but
> hidden
> file:///C:/app/ghp/doc/libraries/ghc-prim/GHC-Prim.html#t%3ARealWorld
> But I don't understand the comment
> data RealWorld Source
> RealWorld is deeply magical. It is primitive, but it is
> not unlifted (hence ptrArg). We never manipulate values of type RealWorld;
> it's only used in the type system, to parameterise State#.
> Maybe I should reread the papers, but it seems lots of magic is needed to
> get IO right (such as the existential types to make sure different state
> threads are kept separate)
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Bayley, Alistair
> <Alistair.Bayley at invesco.com> wrote:
>>
>> > From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org
>> > [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Bulat Ziganshin
>> > To: Peter Verswyvelen
>> >
>> > > But how does GHC implement the RealWorld internally? I guess
>> >
>> > look the "base" library sources for "RealWorld"
>>
>> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/src/GHC-IOBas
>> e.html#IO
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