[Haskell] Excessive sharing and GHC

[John Meacham]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 08:31:19AM +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> GHC tries not to create space leaks, but does not guarantee not to.  In
> particular, the full laziness transformation is so beneficial most of
> the time that, even though it can create a space leak GHC still does it
> (unless you turn it off with a flag).

I was thinking it would be nice if one could put a pragma on CAFs that
basically made ghc treat them as WHNF so it would float them inward as
far as possible including inside lambdas. in particular, constant
strings that are created (cheaply) from efficient internal
representations should not be held onto in their inefficient form.

it might even be worth it to have a pragma that made ghc think they
were duplicatable too, so it would float them all the way to each of their
uses, duplicating the expression as necessary just to make sure it is
never held onto more than needed.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈