add INLINEABLE to maybe, either, bool

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Looks great to me, thanks.  I imagine you are proposing this as a preamble to 7.18.5.1?
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/pragmas.html#inline-noinline-pragma

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Libraries [mailto:libraries-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
| Simon Marlow
| Sent: 26 September 2013 16:46
| To: Austin Seipp
| Cc: Haskell Libraries
| Subject: Re: add INLINEABLE to maybe, either, bool
| 
| I read this discussion and thought that one small thing we could do is
| to clarify the documentation for INLINE a bit.  Here's what I came up
| with; comments welcome.  I'll commit this if there are no objections.
| 
|          <para>
|            GHC (with <option>-O</option>, as always) tries to inline
|            (or &ldquo;unfold&rdquo;) functions/values that are
|            &ldquo;small enough,&rdquo; thus avoiding the call overhead
|            and possibly exposing other more-wonderful optimisations.
|            GHC has a set of heuristics, tuned over a long period of
|            time using many benchmarks, that decide when it is
|            beneficial to inline a function at its call site.  The
|            heuristics are designed to inline functions when it appears
|            to be beneficial to do so, but without incurring excessive
|            code bloat.  If a function looks too big, it won't be
|            inlined, and functions larger than a certain size will not
|            even have their definition exported in the interface file.
|            Some of the thresholds that govern these heuristic decisions
|            can be changed using flags, see <xref linkend="options-f"
|            />.
|          </para>
| 
|          <para>
|            Normally GHC will do a reasonable job of deciding by itself
|            when it is a good idea to inline a function.  However,
|            sometimes you might want to override the default behaviour.
|            For exmaple, if you have a key function that is important to
|            inline because it leads to further optimisations, but GHC
|            judges it to be too big to inline.
|          </para>
| 
| Cheers,
| Simon
| 
| 
| 
| On 16/09/2013 19:03, Austin Seipp wrote:
| > In light of some recent conversations with others and self-review, I
| > realize my prior messages may have been too strong, come off as
| > hostile, or outright combative.
| >
| > I'd like to publicly apologize for that: I'm sorry to ruffle feathers.
| > (As a GHC developer, what seems 'obvious' to me is much different than
| > most people, I realize.)
| >
| > Now, in light of some discussions I had on IRC, there *are* things we
| > can do here, and I'd like to lightly recap my position and some other
| > points. To wit:
| >
| >   * I think it is bad to overuse things like INLINE, and I believe it
| > encourages people to not understand the implications of what the
| > compiler is doing (all programmers generally must have some intuition
| > and control over their programs, and how they run.)
| >
| >   * Using the INLINE hammer everywhere makes it *incredibly* difficult
| > to see where GHC deficiencies are, and that's not what we want - it
| > hurts our ability to have informed decisions and examples. I also find
| > it slightly disheartening that many people don't think GHC can handle
| > cases like this.
| >
| >   * But Haskell is a language where inlining may not make a
| > constant-factor difference, but *orders of magnitude difference*.
| > vector-algorithms is a good example of this, and I'm not sure anyone
| > knows how to 'fix it' so it doesn't have to INLINE literally
| > everything. We're talking 10 orders of magnitude difference, if I
| > remember my conversations with Dan/Edward correctly. lens is a lesser
| > example: there are cases where GHC won't inline due to fear of work
| > duplication or other unusual cases, but we can tackle these in GHC in
| > some cases (and have.)
| >
| >   * We tend to be quite sensitive to performance matters as a
| community, I feel.
| >
| >   * And sometimes, things are hard. Even for people like Simon,
| > 'fixing' bad inliner behavior can be a monstrous task, and INLINE is
| > certainly a way to help the compiler when its hands are tied.
| >
| > Ultimately, nobody is wrong here. But we have options, and two of them
| > people brought up are good ones I think.
| >
| >   1.) Perhaps GHC should have a flag to warn you if you use
| > INLINE/INLINEABLE on a definition that the inliner would have dealt
| > with anyway. This should not be on by default with -Wall. But it would
| > give us a useful tool to examine our assumptions more easily in a lot
| > of cases.
| >
| >   2.) GHC does have a testsuite with many performance-related tests,
| > and tests that check the Core. We could easily add a test that checked
| > the core output of bool, maybe, and either (and other functions, as
| > time may go on.) This is much easier and probably more robust than
| > trying to contrive an example of what the performance difference might
| > be.
| >
| > Personally, I am way more interested in #1, as opposed to #2 (a
| > failure to inline something so small would quickly be noticed -
| > because lots of things probably won't inline at that point and our
| > tests will fail!) However, I believe both of these are relatively
| > easy, and quite feasible to implement.
| >
| > Unfortunately, I have about 10,000,000 things on my plate with the
| > upcoming release. So I'm afraid I don't have time to do these myself.
| >
| > So, patches welcome! However, I am more than willing to help people
| > get their feet wet in doing the work. You can email me (same email I'm
| > using now,) or contact me on IRC (freenode, nick 'thoughtpolice') if
| > you prefer more real time communication. I'll help you to the best of
| > my abilities if you'd like to give it a go.
| >
| >
| > On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 4:56 PM, Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com>
| wrote:
| >> A serious question: if you don't even trust GHC to inline 'bool',
| >> 'maybe' or 'either', given their triviality, do you trust it to ever
| >> inline anything at all? I'm being completely honest here.
| >>
| >> It still ignores the question of *why* the inliner is failing to do
| >> what you want. If the type inferencer fails to infer the type of an
| >> utterly trivial function - let's again say 'bool :: a -> a -> Bool ->
| >> a', as it's type is about as trivial as it's definition - it is
| almost
| >> certainly broken. By the same token, GHC not inlining 'bool' under -O
| >> would almost certainly be a bug too, in my eyes. The definition is
| >> trivial to the point where we should not ask "what if it doesn't
| >> inline" - we should figure out WHY it does not do so. Maybe INLINE
| >> would be a justified way of fixing it, but in this case it's just
| >> unnecessary and has been verified as such.
| >>
| >> By the same token, we also don't encourage people to wildly put `seq`
| >> everywhere, or make everything on earth strict just because it makes
| >> them feel good.
| >>
| >> A compiler must work on a broad range of programs for a broad range
| of
| >> use cases. There are certainly some cases that the compiler is *not*
| >> tuned for. In some of these cases, we work to make them more
| >> efficient. We patch the compiler to make it better where-ever
| >> possible. But this case? This is nothing but a premature optimization
| >> in my eyes - and one that even people like Edward or myself are
| guilty
| >> of, for sure.* And I am repenting by rejecting the "INLINE school of
| >> thought" (or INLINE school of hammers, as it were.)
| >>
| >> If you want to make the argument that 'bool' - or something else even
| >> - should be INLINE, by all means do so. But if you're going to do so
| >> without any empirical cases, or examples of why it should be so
| >> (especially when we have already checked the interface files,) and
| >> just say it lets you sleep better at night? I simply do not buy it.
| >>
| >>
| >> On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Dan Burton
| <danburton.email at gmail.com> wrote:
| >>> I'm wary of "let's not mark it as INLINE because we want the
| compiler to
| >>> automagically inline it for us." This seems like saying we should
| not have
| >>> type signatures, because we want the type inferencer to figure it
| out for
| >>> us. (If you want to test the auto-inliner's wisdom, then just add a
| setting
| >>> that ignores INLINE pragmas and see if it inlines the same thing
| that humans
| >>> do?)
| >>>
| >>> I don't really care how it's accomplished, but I do think that we
| should
| >>> make sure that maybe, either, and bool are inlined, and the most
| obvious way
| >>> to accomplish this is to directly mark them INLINE, is it not?
| >>>
| >>> -- Dan Burton
| >>>
| >>>
| >>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com>
| wrote:
| >>>>
| >>>> Contrary to appearances, I fully agree. =)
| >>>>
| >>>>
| >>>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Austin Seipp <austin at well-
| typed.com>
| >>>> wrote:
| >>>>>
| >>>>> I'm strongly opposed to this.
| >>>>>
| >>>>> Being INLINE happy is not a good thing, it is a bad thing. More
| often
| >>>>> than not, I see people stuffing INLINE all over the place for
| things
| >>>>> that would trivially be unfolded and put in the interface file
| anyway.
| >>>>> This is bad, and it teaches people to just use the INLINE hammer
| >>>>> everywhere instead of understanding the actual implications of
| what
| >>>>> the inliner does. It also makes it impossible to actually observe
| how
| >>>>> the inliner behaves and see where it needs tuning: if we just mark
| >>>>> everything INLINE, we might as well not have it and make it
| >>>>> unconditional.
| >>>>>
| >>>>> There are some particular cases where GHC is hesitant to inline
| small
| >>>>> things if it would lead to work duplication, or where the inliner
| >>>>> behavior is tweaked and you may want to force it across multiple
| >>>>> versions to be sure (lens is a good example of this.) But this is
| far
| >>>>> more rare, and this case is not that. In particular, Joachim
| checked
| >>>>> the 'bool' commit. As expected, the unfolding for bool was put
| into
| >>>>> the interface file for Data.Bool, meaning if you use -O (or just -
| O0
| >>>>> -fno-ignore-interface-pragmas,) it should be inlined at call sites
| >>>>> appropriately when it is used.
| >>>>>
| >>>>> If we're going to INLINE things, we need to make sure it actually
| has
| >>>>> an empirical benefit, by looking at the core, and seeing where the
| >>>>> inliner is failing. Not just attach it to things because it seems
| like
| >>>>> a good idea. This also helps drive feedback into the inliner so we
| can
| >>>>> see where it fails.
| >>>>>
| >>>>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Carter Schonwald
| >>>>> <carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:
| >>>>>> Its come to my attention that maybe, either, and its new sibling
| bool,
| >>>>>> all
| >>>>>> lack the
| >>>>>> INLINEABLE attribute, or its more aggressive sibling INLINE
| >>>>>>
| >>>>>> this seems like one of those operations where inlining in client
| use
| >>>>>> sites
| >>>>>> is a good option to have, and currently not possible!
| >>>>>>
| >>>>>> theres probably other stuff that would benefit from an INLINEABLE
| >>>>>> pragma in
| >>>>>> base,
| >>>>>> but this is an obvious, simple, "easy win" that I noticed when
| Oliver's
| >>>>>> patch got merged into base.
| >>>>>>
| >>>>>> Thoughts?
| >>>>>> Time scale: sometime this week? (ghc 7.8 merge window is
| landing!)
| >>>>>>
| >>>>>> cheers
| >>>>>>
| >>>>>> _______________________________________________
| >>>>>> Libraries mailing list
| >>>>>> Libraries at haskell.org
| >>>>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
| >>>>>>
| >>>>>
| >>>>>
| >>>>>
| >>>>> --
| >>>>> Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
| >>>>> Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/
| >>>>> _______________________________________________
| >>>>> Libraries mailing list
| >>>>> Libraries at haskell.org
| >>>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
| >>>>
| >>>>
| >>>>
| >>>> _______________________________________________
| >>>> Libraries mailing list
| >>>> Libraries at haskell.org
| >>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
| >>>>
| >>>
| >>
| >>
| >>
| >> --
| >> Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
| >> Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/
| >
| >
| >
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