[Haskell] memory management

[Colin Runciman]

Nathan,

>      I'm interested in research relating to memory management in 
> Haskell. I'm at the point where I don't know enough to have very 
> specific questions, but I'm especially interested in garbage collection 
> in Haskell, and any available statistics (such as, how long does a thunk 
> typically live before its evaluated, after its evaluated?), or tools 
> that would let me get that sort of information more easily. If any one 
> could be so kind as to point me to relevant research papers or other 
> documentation, it would be very much appreciated.

In the early to mid '90s we built various heap-profiling tools to 
examine the characteristics of heap data in lazy functional programs. 
You can find papers describing this work by Googling "heap profiling". 
You may be particularly interested in the investigation of "heap lag" 
and "heap drag" -- see for example the ICFP'96 paper.  Others have 
worked on similar tools since, but I'm not sure how extensive heap 
profiling facilities are in ghc, the most widely used implementation of 
Haskell.

Regards
Colin R