Re: GHC and type-family rewriting?

On Nov 30, 2022, at 9:42 PM, Benjamin Redelings wrote:

(Q1) Did GHC evolve to this point starting from something fairly close to the OutsideIn paper?

Yes.

(Q2) Is the new approach (i.e. eager type family rewriting) mostly to making rewriting faster?

No. Simpler, not faster (and not slower). Or that was the intent.

(Q3) Does it sound reasonable to implement the approach from the OutsideIn paper, and than gradually transform it to look more like GHC?

Sure, but I'm not sure what the advantage of doing so would be. This is all my doing: for years and years, GHC's treatment of type families was as described in OutsideIn. But I never could quite figure out why we needed to have flattening variables. And so I got rid of them -- this seemed like a simplification. I'm not sure it really panned out, though: without flattening variables, we need these cycle-breaker variables (which are pretty gross). On the flip side, I think the new approach might enable the possibility of reducing type families only in "strict" positions (e.g. the argument to another type family or perhaps a class during instance lookup). In the end, I don't think either the old way or the new way is the Right Answer. Maybe you can come up with something better than both! Richard

-BenRI

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