[Haskell-cafe] Re: Implementing "unionAll"

[Evan Laforge]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 5:22 PM, Leon Smith <leon.p.smith at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> BTW, I notice that your merges, like mine, are left-biased.  This is a
>> useful property (my callers require it), and doesn't seem to cost
>> anything to implement, so maybe you could commit to it in the
>> documentation?

Ohh, I see it now, I just wasn't looking at the module doc.

> Also, I did briefly consider giving up left bias.  GHC has an
> optimization strategy that seeks to reduce pattern matching,  and due
> to interactions with this I could have saved a few kilobytes of -O2
> object code size by giving up left-bias.

Interesting... but left bias is so useful I think it's worth a few extra k.

> If you are curious why,  I suggest taking a look at GHC's core output
> for each of these two variants.   The hackage package "ghc-core"
> makes this a little bit more pleasant,  as it can pretty-print it for
> you.

I can see there's one extra case in the first one, and I can tell the
last case is the 'loop' case including the case on Ordering, but I
admit I don't understand what the previous cases are doing.  Core is
really hard for me to read.

> It's amazing to think that this library,  at 55k (Optimized -O2 for
> x64),  would take up most of the memory of my very first computer,  a
> Commodore 64.   Of course,  I'm sure there are many others on this
> list who's first computers had a small fraction of 64k of memory to
> play with.  :-)

It's not even that much assembly.

I intended to write a small quick program... then I did it in haskell,
and then I linked in the GHC API (fatal blow).  Now the stripped
optimized binary is 22MB (optimization doesn't seem to have an effect
on size).  The non-haskell UI part is 367k...