Dear devs
At the moment the INLINEABLE pragma means "capture my right-hand side, regardless of how big it is, so that it can be type-class-specialised, including in other modules". But it also says "feel free to inline me".
Some users (eg Gergo) want to say NOINLINE on some functions. But for these they'd still like to generate type-class-specialised versions. After all, if we aren't going to inline them, specialising is the next best thing.
But we have no way to say both "specialise me" and "don't inline me", because you can't say both INLINEABLE and NOINLINE. (That would look silly.)
I think we should probably just bite the bullet and add a SPECIALISABLE pragma, orthogonal to INLINE/NOINLNE, which say
"capture my right-hand side, regardless of how big it is, so that it can be type-class-specialised, including in other modules". It behaves exactly like INLINEABLE except that you can specify it along with INLINE/NOINLINE.
Any thoughts? Do you think this needs a GHC proposal?
Simon