On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 3:06 AM, Konrad Szyc
Dear Haskell-Beginners
I have a problem understanding how ACID-state stores its data. To be more specific, I would like to know how does it deal with lazy evaluation. I suppose it tries to "strictly" evaluate functions before serializing, but then how does it handle infinitely-recursive structures?
The acid-state library uses the safecopy library to perform serialization and deserialization: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/safecopy The safecopy library has template-haskell functions to write serializers and de-serializers for your types for you, however you may hand-write them if you desire. The auto-generated serialization code will fully-evaluate their arguments, and I have no idea what they would do if a type had cycles in it. In order to write code to be aware of laziness and cycles you would need to use some very low-level hooks in GHC (or whichever compiler you are using) and put that knowledge into your hand-written serializer and deserializer for your type. So the short answer is "No". Antoine