[Haskell-cafe] Global memoization in Haskell

[Albert Zeyer]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Stephen Tetley
<stephen.tetley at gmail.com> wrote:
> There isn't much value to automatic memoization as people have already
> pointed out on SO - if you believe otherwise, you're probably better
> off proving a case on paper first before attempting to implement it in
> GHC.

Hi Stephen,

I think there are already many many examples where memoization does
indeed give much better performance (very simple and common one is the
Fibonacci sequence).

So the prove was already done. I am not sure what to prove otherwise.
Demonstrating that it does indeed perform well when you apply it
globally to some real-world application is not really something you
prove on a paper. You do the actual benchmarking instead. I.e., you
implement the memoization in GHC and benchmark some programs with it.
Implementing it shouldn't also be complicated -- I already presented a
60 line Python implementation which is trivial to be applied globally
and took 10 minutes to be implemented.

I'm not sure though how complicated it would be to add that to GHC. I
have no idea where to start.

Regards,
Albert