[Haskell-cafe] ANN: generic-deepseq 1.0.0.0

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas at gmail.com> writes:

> Also in my experience (with generics support in aeson and cereal) it's
> a very good idea (performance-wise) to INLINE your methods like I did
> in my previous message. Of course the only way to know for sure is the
> create some (criterion) benchmarks.

btw, how much is GHC able to optimize the GHC.Generics based NFData
instance as e.g. compared to what GHC is able to optimize with
deepseq-th[1]?

> One last issue: Say I have a type like: "data T = C !Int"
> Currently GHC Generics can't express the strictness annotation. This
> means that your deepseq will unnecessarily evaluate the Int (since it
> will always be evaluated already). It would be nice if the strictness
> information could be added to the K1 type. (José, would it be hard to
> add this to GHC.Generics?)

that's btw one thing that I tried hard to avoid in deepseq-th[1], by
having a hacky predicate 

decWhnfIsNf :: Dec -> Q (Maybe Bool)

whis is able to detect whether WHNF is the same as NF for a given
declaration;

e.g. in the following case (see also the example in [1]):

data Foo = Foo !Int !Int !Int

data Bar = Bar !Foo !Foo

the instance generated would be:

instance NFData Foo
instance NFData Bar

since the WHNF=NF property holds for Foo as well as for Bar


 [1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/deepseq-th/0.1.0.2/doc/html/Control-DeepSeq-TH.html