[Haskell-cafe] ANN: Hemkay, the 100% Haskell MOD player

[Henning Thielemann]

Patai Gergely schrieb:

>> It is the strength of Haskell to separate everything into
>> logical steps and let laziness do things simultaneously. Stream fusion
>> can eliminate interim lists, and final conversion to storable vector
>> using http://hackage.haskell.org/package/storablevector-streamfusion/
>> can eliminate lists at all.
>
> But in my understanding that elimination is only possible if lists are
> not used as persistent containers, only to mimic control structures. Now
> I rely on samples being stored as lists, so I can represent looping
> samples with infinite lists and not worry about the wrap-around at all.
> So in order to have any chance for fusion I'd have to store samples as
> vectors and wrap them in some kind of unfold mechanism to turn them into
> lists that can be potentially fused away. In other words, besides a
> 'good consumer', I need a 'good producer' too.

Right. The conversion from storablevector to stream-fusion:Stream is
such a good producer.

> However, there seems to be a conflict between the nature of mixing and
> stream processing when it comes to efficiency. As it turns out, it's
> more efficient to process channels one by one within a chunk instead of
> producing samples one by one. It takes a lot less context switching to
> first generate the output of channel 1, then generate channel 2 (and
> simultaneously add it to the mix) and so on, than to mix sample 1 of all
> channels, then sample 2 etc., since we can write much tighter loops when
> we only deal with one channel at a time.

Yes, I would also do it this way. So in the end you will have some
storablevectors as intermediate data structures.