Re: Performance of pattern checker on OptCoercions

If I understand correctly, you're saying that the problem is due to my use of guards, not anything with fancy types. If that's correct, then this sort of thing might be a trap anyone could stumble into. (The code in OptCoercion is fairly routine for Haskell.) It seems like disabling checking guards by default may be best, but I'd love a flag (not with -Wall) to enable it optionally. Richard On Dec 11, 2015, at 6:27 AM, George Karachalias wrote:

Hello Ben,

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Ben Gamari wrote:

Hi George,

Richard has encountered a bit of a performance cliff when merging his no-kinds work. In particular OptCoercions now results in multiple gigabytes of memory consumption during compilation due to the pattern checker. The problem seems to be the opt_trans_rule binding, which has numerous equations, each of which has patterns of various complexities and guards. Might this be another case where disabling the pattern checker is unavoidable?

I am afraid so. I have just responded to the ticket about it. The essence is the difference between `f` and `g` below:

f x = case x of [] -> ... (_:_) -> ...

g y | [] <- y = ... | (_:_) <- y = ...

`f` will generate an empty uncovered set while g will generate:

uncovered = { x |> { x ~ [], x ~ (_:_) } , x |> { x ~ (_:_), x ~ [] } }

which is also semantically empty but this cannot be detected until we call the term oracle on it to see the inconsistency. Since pattern guards can pattern match against any variable whilst case expressions match a single expression (`x` above) I can not make the check treat them the same.

From what I see, until now the pattern guards in opt_trans_co involved mostly pattern matching with Maybe which has only two constructors. I can easily assume that this is the reason we did not have such a problem until now. So many guards are already a challenge for the pattern match checker but maybe changing this (by this I mean to not use pattern guards on types with many constructors because this is the most expensive thing for the whole check) is enough to make GHC bootstrap.

I hope this helps, I am really confident that this is the cause of the problem. Nevertheless, I will look into it more to see if I can find another source.

George

-- things you own end up owning you