[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hughes' parallel annotations for fixing a space leak

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Max Bolingbroke wrote:
> Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
>
>> As I understand it, GHC implements the technique from Sparud's paper, so
>> this is a solved problem.
> 
> This is not my understanding. As far as I know, the STG machine has a
> special notion of "selector thunks", which represent projections from
> product data types. These selector thunks are evaluated by the GHC
> garbage collector in the manner proposed by Wadler.

Ah, that's how it is. Thanks. :)

Funny that this special garbage collector support isn't used when
compiling with -O0, though. But it makes sense to be required to use at
least -O1 when you care about resources.

> The Sparud solution is IMHO much cleaner, though!

I agree. It still requires special support from the garbage collector,
though. Namely, the gc has to short-circuit indirection nodes, otherwise
the pairs will be replaced by a long chain of indirection nodes and the
 break  example would still leak.

In a sense, Sparud's idea is about expressing selector thunks in terms
of indirections and mutable thunk updates.


Regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

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