
Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a NameU: reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name reifyName thing | isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str | otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name)) ... NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to ABI-incompatible binaries. This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list. The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes and can potentially be optimized differently. I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an ordering key. To be more concrete: - | NameU !Int + | NameU !Int !Int This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys: + tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int), Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and translate the Uniques on the fly. This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least: - singletons - th-lift - haskell-src-meta - shakespeare - distributed-closure I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem is worth solving. Cheers, Bartosz [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...

On May 31, 2016, at 9:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem is worth solving.
I don't have an opinion about "worth solving". While I understand your description of the problem and believe you that it crops up in practice, I don't have a grasp on the net effect of this all. Bottom line on this front: I trust your judgment. As to the breaking change: go for it. Template Haskell churns a good deal between releases (though not within a single major release) and so breaking changes are common. And NameFlavour really should be abstract (it can't be due to the linkage between the template-haskell and ghc packages) and anyone who uses it (including me) is doing something fishy. Accordingly, I'd personally be OK with a breaking change in a minor release around NameFlavour, as long as nothing exported from Language.Haskell.TH is changed. (We do have a way of using CPP to detect minor version bumps, right?) I hope this helps, Richard

+1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the
following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to
determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct the
(Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's
initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there, though,
which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef that's
used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file
and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to
break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules
(seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up
with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How
about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly
resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also
yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly
vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get
the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given
reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case, then
this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at
all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's
suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and
package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name reifyName thing | isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str | otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name)) ... NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list. The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int + | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and translate the Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons - th-lift - haskell-src-meta - shakespeare - distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem is worth solving.
Cheers, Bartosz
[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to this ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
S
From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Michael Sloan
Sent: 02 June 2016 02:07
To: Bartosz Nitka

On Jun 2, 2016, at 7:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
singletons uses NameU in two places: 1. To generate unique numbers. It would be easy enough for me to put this functionality in my own monad, though. 2. More importantly, to work around GHC's #11812, caused by the fact that `NameU`s don't always work when other Names would. So I have to squeeze out `NameU`s in one spot. Richard

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to this ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
True, top level names are NameG. The reified Info for a top level Dec may include NameU, though. For example, the type variables in 'Maybe' are NameU: $(do TyConI (DataD _ _ [KindedTV (Name _ nf) _] _ _ _) <- reify ''Maybe lift (show nf)) The resulting expression is something like "NameU 822083586"
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
It's being leaked in the public inteface via Ord. The Eq instance is fine, because these are Uniques, so the results should be consistent. There are two goals in contention here: 1) Having some ordering on Names so that they can be used in Map or Set 2) Having law-abiding Eq / Ord instances. We'd need a 'PartialOrd' to really handle these well. In that case, the ordering would be based on everything but the NameU int, but 'Eq' would still follow it A few ideas for different approaches to resolving this: 1) Document it. Less appealing than fixing it in the API, but still would be good. 2) Remove the 'Ord' instance, and force the user to pick 'NamePartialOrd' newtype (partial ord on the non-unique info), or 'UnstableNameOrd' newtype (current behavior). A trickyness of this approach is that you'd need containers that can handle (PartialOrd k, Eq k) keys. In lots of cases people are using the 'Ord' instance with 'Name's that are not 'NameU', so this would break a lot of code that was already deterministic. 3) Some approaches like this ordering key, but I'm not sure how it will help when comparing NameUs from different modules?
S
*From:* ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael Sloan *Sent:* 02 June 2016 02:07 *To:* Bartosz Nitka
*Cc:* ghc-devs Devs *Subject:* Re: Template Haskell determinism +1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct the (Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there, though, which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef that's used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case, then this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
wrote: Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by
design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is
however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger
accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at
the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a
NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name
reifyName thing
| isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str
| otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name))
...
NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning
that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not
guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to
ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The
microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list.
The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes
and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a
solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an
ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int
+ | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to
ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that
reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially
allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now
is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and translate the
Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons
- th-lift
- haskell-src-meta
- shakespeare
- distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem
is worth solving.
Cheers,
Bartosz
[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fmail.haskell.org%2fcgi-bin%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2fghc-devs&data=01%7c01%7csimonpj%40064d.mgd.microsoft.com%7c1a4a84c9341546403e1508d38a8246ee%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=mjEDuk%2fuRsDLg0q63zaIBeh5e2IyfKnKjcEcRLDvERE%3d

I must admit, I am a bit confused by this discussion. It is true that every Name is associated with a Unique. But you don't need the Unique to equality/ordering tests; the names also contain enough (stable) information for stable comparisons of that sort. So why don't we expose that instead of the Unique? Edward Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-04 18:44:03 -0700:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones
wrote: If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to this ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
True, top level names are NameG. The reified Info for a top level Dec may include NameU, though. For example, the type variables in 'Maybe' are NameU:
$(do TyConI (DataD _ _ [KindedTV (Name _ nf) _] _ _ _) <- reify ''Maybe lift (show nf))
The resulting expression is something like "NameU 822083586"
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
It's being leaked in the public inteface via Ord. The Eq instance is fine, because these are Uniques, so the results should be consistent.
There are two goals in contention here:
1) Having some ordering on Names so that they can be used in Map or Set 2) Having law-abiding Eq / Ord instances. We'd need a 'PartialOrd' to really handle these well. In that case, the ordering would be based on everything but the NameU int, but 'Eq' would still follow it
A few ideas for different approaches to resolving this:
1) Document it. Less appealing than fixing it in the API, but still would be good.
2) Remove the 'Ord' instance, and force the user to pick 'NamePartialOrd' newtype (partial ord on the non-unique info), or 'UnstableNameOrd' newtype (current behavior). A trickyness of this approach is that you'd need containers that can handle (PartialOrd k, Eq k) keys. In lots of cases people are using the 'Ord' instance with 'Name's that are not 'NameU', so this would break a lot of code that was already deterministic.
3) Some approaches like this ordering key, but I'm not sure how it will help when comparing NameUs from different modules?
S
*From:* ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael Sloan *Sent:* 02 June 2016 02:07 *To:* Bartosz Nitka
*Cc:* ghc-devs Devs *Subject:* Re: Template Haskell determinism +1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct the (Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there, though, which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef that's used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case, then this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
wrote: Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by
design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is
however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger
accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at
the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a
NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name
reifyName thing
| isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str
| otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name))
...
NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning
that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not
guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to
ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The
microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list.
The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes
and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a
solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an
ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int
+ | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to
ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that
reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially
allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now
is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and translate the
Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons
- th-lift
- haskell-src-meta
- shakespeare
- distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem
is worth solving.
Cheers,
Bartosz
[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fmail.haskell.org%2fcgi-bin%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2fghc-devs&data=01%7c01%7csimonpj%40064d.mgd.microsoft.com%7c1a4a84c9341546403e1508d38a8246ee%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=mjEDuk%2fuRsDLg0q63zaIBeh5e2IyfKnKjcEcRLDvERE%3d

Hey, sorry for not getting back to this sooner!
Perhaps I should have added the following to my list of goals in contention:
(3) (==) shouldn't yield True for Names that have different unique ids.
We can only have stable comparisons if goal (3) isn't met, and two
different unique Names would be considered to be equivalent based on the
nameBase. This is because Ord is a total order, not a partial order. As
described in my prior email, PartialOrd could be added, but it'd be
inconvenient to use with existing Ord based containers.
-Michael
On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Edward Z. Yang
I must admit, I am a bit confused by this discussion.
It is true that every Name is associated with a Unique. But you don't need the Unique to equality/ordering tests; the names also contain enough (stable) information for stable comparisons of that sort. So why don't we expose that instead of the Unique?
Edward
On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones < simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to
ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
True, top level names are NameG. The reified Info for a top level Dec may include NameU, though. For example, the type variables in 'Maybe' are NameU:
$(do TyConI (DataD _ _ [KindedTV (Name _ nf) _] _ _ _) <- reify ''Maybe lift (show nf))
The resulting expression is something like "NameU 822083586"
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
It's being leaked in the public inteface via Ord. The Eq instance is fine, because these are Uniques, so the results should be consistent.
There are two goals in contention here:
1) Having some ordering on Names so that they can be used in Map or Set 2) Having law-abiding Eq / Ord instances. We'd need a 'PartialOrd' to really handle these well. In that case, the ordering would be based on everything but the NameU int, but 'Eq' would still follow it
A few ideas for different approaches to resolving this:
1) Document it. Less appealing than fixing it in the API, but still would be good.
2) Remove the 'Ord' instance, and force the user to pick 'NamePartialOrd' newtype (partial ord on the non-unique info), or 'UnstableNameOrd' newtype (current behavior). A trickyness of this approach is that you'd need containers that can handle (PartialOrd k, Eq k) keys. In lots of cases people are using the 'Ord' instance with 'Name's that are not 'NameU', so this would break a lot of code that was already deterministic.
3) Some approaches like this ordering key, but I'm not sure how it will help when comparing NameUs from different modules?
S
*From:* ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael Sloan *Sent:* 02 June 2016 02:07 *To:* Bartosz Nitka
*Cc:* ghc-devs Devs *Subject:* Re: Template Haskell determinism +1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct
(Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there,
which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef
used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case,
this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
wrote: Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by
design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is
however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger
accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at
the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a
NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name
reifyName thing
| isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str
| otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name))
...
NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning
that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not
guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to
ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The
microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list.
The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes
and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a
solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an
ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int
+ | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to
ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that
reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially
allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now
is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-04 18:44:03 -0700: this the though, that's then translate
the
Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons
- th-lift
- haskell-src-meta
- shakespeare
- distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem
is worth solving.
Cheers,
Bartosz
[1]
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs <

No, nameBase is not the right thing to use here; you also need the unit ID (in GHC 8.0 parlance; package key in GHC 7.10; package id in GHC 7.8 and before). If you have that information, then GHC establishes an invariant that if two names compare stably equal, then the uniques associated with them are the same. Edward Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-10 17:16:44 -0400:
Hey, sorry for not getting back to this sooner!
Perhaps I should have added the following to my list of goals in contention:
(3) (==) shouldn't yield True for Names that have different unique ids.
We can only have stable comparisons if goal (3) isn't met, and two different unique Names would be considered to be equivalent based on the nameBase. This is because Ord is a total order, not a partial order. As described in my prior email, PartialOrd could be added, but it'd be inconvenient to use with existing Ord based containers.
-Michael
On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Edward Z. Yang
wrote: I must admit, I am a bit confused by this discussion.
It is true that every Name is associated with a Unique. But you don't need the Unique to equality/ordering tests; the names also contain enough (stable) information for stable comparisons of that sort. So why don't we expose that instead of the Unique?
Edward
On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones < simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to
ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
True, top level names are NameG. The reified Info for a top level Dec may include NameU, though. For example, the type variables in 'Maybe' are NameU:
$(do TyConI (DataD _ _ [KindedTV (Name _ nf) _] _ _ _) <- reify ''Maybe lift (show nf))
The resulting expression is something like "NameU 822083586"
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
It's being leaked in the public inteface via Ord. The Eq instance is fine, because these are Uniques, so the results should be consistent.
There are two goals in contention here:
1) Having some ordering on Names so that they can be used in Map or Set 2) Having law-abiding Eq / Ord instances. We'd need a 'PartialOrd' to really handle these well. In that case, the ordering would be based on everything but the NameU int, but 'Eq' would still follow it
A few ideas for different approaches to resolving this:
1) Document it. Less appealing than fixing it in the API, but still would be good.
2) Remove the 'Ord' instance, and force the user to pick 'NamePartialOrd' newtype (partial ord on the non-unique info), or 'UnstableNameOrd' newtype (current behavior). A trickyness of this approach is that you'd need containers that can handle (PartialOrd k, Eq k) keys. In lots of cases people are using the 'Ord' instance with 'Name's that are not 'NameU', so this would break a lot of code that was already deterministic.
3) Some approaches like this ordering key, but I'm not sure how it will help when comparing NameUs from different modules?
S
*From:* ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael Sloan *Sent:* 02 June 2016 02:07 *To:* Bartosz Nitka
*Cc:* ghc-devs Devs *Subject:* Re: Template Haskell determinism +1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct
(Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there,
which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef
used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case,
this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
wrote: Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by
design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is
however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger
accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at
the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a
NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name
reifyName thing
| isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str
| otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name))
...
NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning
that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not
guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to
ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The
microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list.
The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes
and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a
solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an
ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int
+ | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to
ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that
reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially
allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now
is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-04 18:44:03 -0700: this the though, that's then translate
the
Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons
- th-lift
- haskell-src-meta
- shakespeare
- distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem
is worth solving.
Cheers,
Bartosz
[1]
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs <

No, NameU and NameL both lack package key / package id.
-Michael
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Edward Z. Yang
No, nameBase is not the right thing to use here; you also need the unit ID (in GHC 8.0 parlance; package key in GHC 7.10; package id in GHC 7.8 and before). If you have that information, then GHC establishes an invariant that if two names compare stably equal, then the uniques associated with them are the same.
Edward
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-10 17:16:44 -0400:
Hey, sorry for not getting back to this sooner!
Perhaps I should have added the following to my list of goals in contention:
(3) (==) shouldn't yield True for Names that have different unique ids.
We can only have stable comparisons if goal (3) isn't met, and two different unique Names would be considered to be equivalent based on the nameBase. This is because Ord is a total order, not a partial order. As described in my prior email, PartialOrd could be added, but it'd be inconvenient to use with existing Ord based containers.
-Michael
On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Edward Z. Yang
wrote: I must admit, I am a bit confused by this discussion.
It is true that every Name is associated with a Unique. But you don't need the Unique to equality/ordering tests; the names also contain enough (stable) information for stable comparisons of that sort. So why don't we expose that instead of the Unique?
Edward
On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones < simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to
ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
True, top level names are NameG. The reified Info for a top level Dec may include NameU, though. For example, the type variables in 'Maybe' are NameU:
$(do TyConI (DataD _ _ [KindedTV (Name _ nf) _] _ _ _) <- reify ''Maybe lift (show nf))
The resulting expression is something like "NameU 822083586"
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
It's being leaked in the public inteface via Ord. The Eq instance is fine, because these are Uniques, so the results should be consistent.
There are two goals in contention here:
1) Having some ordering on Names so that they can be used in Map or Set 2) Having law-abiding Eq / Ord instances. We'd need a 'PartialOrd' to really handle these well. In that case, the ordering would be based on everything but the NameU int, but 'Eq' would still follow it
A few ideas for different approaches to resolving this:
1) Document it. Less appealing than fixing it in the API, but still would be good.
2) Remove the 'Ord' instance, and force the user to pick 'NamePartialOrd' newtype (partial ord on the non-unique info), or 'UnstableNameOrd' newtype (current behavior). A trickyness of this approach is that you'd need containers that can handle (PartialOrd k, Eq k) keys. In lots of cases people are using the 'Ord' instance with 'Name's that are not 'NameU', so this would break a lot of code that was already deterministic.
3) Some approaches like this ordering key, but I'm not sure how it will help when comparing NameUs from different modules?
S
*From:* ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael Sloan *Sent:* 02 June 2016 02:07 *To:* Bartosz Nitka
*Cc:* ghc-devs Devs *Subject:* Re: Template Haskell determinism +1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct
(Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there,
which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef
used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case,
this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
wrote: Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by
design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is
however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger
accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at
the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a
NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name
reifyName thing
| isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str
| otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name))
...
NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning
that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not
guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to
ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The
microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list.
The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes
and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a
solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an
ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int
+ | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to
ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that
reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially
allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now
is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-04 18:44:03 -0700: this the though, that's then translate
the
Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons
- th-lift
- haskell-src-meta
- shakespeare
- distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem
is worth solving.
Cheers,
Bartosz
[1]
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs <

Also, revisiting this issue, I don't think it is worth solving, just
worth documenting.
Why? Because TH already lets you do lots of incorrect things. TH
already allows you to shoot yourself in the foot all over the place,
and that's ok. I'd much rather it be a dangerous power tool than a
weak safe tool.
When writing TH, you are writing something that's part of the
compiler, and the code can often resemble the sort of involved in the
middle bits of a compiler. For the cases where stable Ord on Name
matters even for local names, you're definitely writing something
that's a fairly fancy, nearly compiler-like transformation. Concerns
like the stability of Names should be handled by the TH user.
-Michael
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 10:41 AM, Michael Sloan
No, NameU and NameL both lack package key / package id.
-Michael
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Edward Z. Yang
wrote: No, nameBase is not the right thing to use here; you also need the unit ID (in GHC 8.0 parlance; package key in GHC 7.10; package id in GHC 7.8 and before). If you have that information, then GHC establishes an invariant that if two names compare stably equal, then the uniques associated with them are the same.
Edward
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-10 17:16:44 -0400:
Hey, sorry for not getting back to this sooner!
Perhaps I should have added the following to my list of goals in contention:
(3) (==) shouldn't yield True for Names that have different unique ids.
We can only have stable comparisons if goal (3) isn't met, and two different unique Names would be considered to be equivalent based on the nameBase. This is because Ord is a total order, not a partial order. As described in my prior email, PartialOrd could be added, but it'd be inconvenient to use with existing Ord based containers.
-Michael
On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Edward Z. Yang
wrote: I must admit, I am a bit confused by this discussion.
It is true that every Name is associated with a Unique. But you don't need the Unique to equality/ordering tests; the names also contain enough (stable) information for stable comparisons of that sort. So why don't we expose that instead of the Unique?
Edward
On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones < simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to
ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
True, top level names are NameG. The reified Info for a top level Dec may include NameU, though. For example, the type variables in 'Maybe' are NameU:
$(do TyConI (DataD _ _ [KindedTV (Name _ nf) _] _ _ _) <- reify ''Maybe lift (show nf))
The resulting expression is something like "NameU 822083586"
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
It's being leaked in the public inteface via Ord. The Eq instance is fine, because these are Uniques, so the results should be consistent.
There are two goals in contention here:
1) Having some ordering on Names so that they can be used in Map or Set 2) Having law-abiding Eq / Ord instances. We'd need a 'PartialOrd' to really handle these well. In that case, the ordering would be based on everything but the NameU int, but 'Eq' would still follow it
A few ideas for different approaches to resolving this:
1) Document it. Less appealing than fixing it in the API, but still would be good.
2) Remove the 'Ord' instance, and force the user to pick 'NamePartialOrd' newtype (partial ord on the non-unique info), or 'UnstableNameOrd' newtype (current behavior). A trickyness of this approach is that you'd need containers that can handle (PartialOrd k, Eq k) keys. In lots of cases people are using the 'Ord' instance with 'Name's that are not 'NameU', so this would break a lot of code that was already deterministic.
3) Some approaches like this ordering key, but I'm not sure how it will help when comparing NameUs from different modules?
S
*From:* ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael Sloan *Sent:* 02 June 2016 02:07 *To:* Bartosz Nitka
*Cc:* ghc-devs Devs *Subject:* Re: Template Haskell determinism +1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct
(Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there,
which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef
used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case,
this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
wrote: Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by
design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is
however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger
accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at
the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a
NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name
reifyName thing
| isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str
| otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name))
...
NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning
that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not
guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to
ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The
microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list.
The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes
and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a
solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an
ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int
+ | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to
ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that
reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially
allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now
is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-04 18:44:03 -0700: this the though, that's then translate
the
Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons
- th-lift
- haskell-src-meta
- shakespeare
- distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem
is worth solving.
Cheers,
Bartosz
[1]
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs <

Oh drat, that's right, local names don't get given a package key / package id, and externally visible local names aren't given a deterministic name until we tidy (which is too late to help Template Haskell.) So I suppose there is not much we can do here. Edward Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-29 13:41:13 -0400:
No, NameU and NameL both lack package key / package id.
-Michael
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Edward Z. Yang
wrote: No, nameBase is not the right thing to use here; you also need the unit ID (in GHC 8.0 parlance; package key in GHC 7.10; package id in GHC 7.8 and before). If you have that information, then GHC establishes an invariant that if two names compare stably equal, then the uniques associated with them are the same.
Edward
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-10 17:16:44 -0400:
Hey, sorry for not getting back to this sooner!
Perhaps I should have added the following to my list of goals in contention:
(3) (==) shouldn't yield True for Names that have different unique ids.
We can only have stable comparisons if goal (3) isn't met, and two different unique Names would be considered to be equivalent based on the nameBase. This is because Ord is a total order, not a partial order. As described in my prior email, PartialOrd could be added, but it'd be inconvenient to use with existing Ord based containers.
-Michael
On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Edward Z. Yang
wrote: I must admit, I am a bit confused by this discussion.
It is true that every Name is associated with a Unique. But you don't need the Unique to equality/ordering tests; the names also contain enough (stable) information for stable comparisons of that sort. So why don't we expose that instead of the Unique?
Edward
On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones < simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal
The I believe that global, top level names (NameG) are not subject to
ordering stuff, so I don’t think this problem can occur.
True, top level names are NameG. The reified Info for a top level Dec may include NameU, though. For example, the type variables in 'Maybe' are NameU:
$(do TyConI (DataD _ _ [KindedTV (Name _ nf) _] _ _ _) <- reify ''Maybe lift (show nf))
The resulting expression is something like "NameU 822083586"
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
But why is NameU exposed to clients? GHC needs to know, but clients don’t. What use are these packages making of it?
It's being leaked in the public inteface via Ord. The Eq instance is fine, because these are Uniques, so the results should be consistent.
There are two goals in contention here:
1) Having some ordering on Names so that they can be used in Map or Set 2) Having law-abiding Eq / Ord instances. We'd need a 'PartialOrd' to really handle these well. In that case, the ordering would be based on everything but the NameU int, but 'Eq' would still follow it
A few ideas for different approaches to resolving this:
1) Document it. Less appealing than fixing it in the API, but still would be good.
2) Remove the 'Ord' instance, and force the user to pick 'NamePartialOrd' newtype (partial ord on the non-unique info), or 'UnstableNameOrd' newtype (current behavior). A trickyness of this approach is that you'd need containers that can handle (PartialOrd k, Eq k) keys. In lots of cases people are using the 'Ord' instance with 'Name's that are not 'NameU', so this would break a lot of code that was already deterministic.
3) Some approaches like this ordering key, but I'm not sure how it will help when comparing NameUs from different modules?
S
*From:* ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael Sloan *Sent:* 02 June 2016 02:07 *To:* Bartosz Nitka
*Cc:* ghc-devs Devs *Subject:* Re: Template Haskell determinism +1 to solving this. Not sure about the approach, but assuming the following concerns are addressed, I'm (+1) on it too:
This solution is clever! However, I think there is some difficulty to determining this ordering key. Namely, what happens when I construct
(Set Name) using results from multiple reifies?
One solution is to have the ordering key be a consecutive supply that's initialized on a per-module basis. There is still an issue there,
which is that you might store one of these names in a global IORef
used by a later TH splice. Or, similarly, serialize the names to a file and later load them. At least in those cases you need to use 'runIO' to break determinism.
If names get different ordering keys when reified from different modules (seems like they'd have to, particularly given ghc's "-j"), then we end up with an unpleasant circumstance where these do not compare as equal. How about having the Eq instance ignore the ordering key? I think that mostly resolves this concern. This implies that the Ord instance should also yield EQ and ignore the ordering key, when the unique key matches.
One issue with this is that switching the order of reify could unexpectedly vary the behavior.
Does the map in TcGblEnv imply that a reify from a later module will get the same ordering key? So does this mean that the keys used in a given reify depend on which things have already been reified? In that case,
this is also an issue with your solution. Now, it's not a big problem at all, just surprising to the user.
If the internal API for Name does change, may as well address https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10311 too. I agree with SPJ's suggested solution of having both the traditional package identifier and package keys in 'Name'.
-Michael
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Bartosz Nitka
wrote: Template Haskell with its ability to do arbitrary IO is non-deterministic by
design. You could for example embed the current date in a file. There is
however one kind of non-deterministic behavior that you can trigger
accidentally. It has to do with how Names are reified. If you take a look at
the definition of reifyName you can see that it puts the assigned Unique in a
NameU:
reifyName :: NamedThing n => n -> TH.Name
reifyName thing
| isExternalName name = mk_varg pkg_str mod_str occ_str
| otherwise = TH.mkNameU occ_str (getKey (getUnique name))
...
NameFlavour which NameU is a constructor of has a default Ord instance, meaning
that it ends up comparing the Uniques. The relative ordering of Uniques is not
guaranteed to be stable across recompilations [1], so this can lead to
ABI-incompatible binaries.
This isn't an abstract problem and it actually happens in practice. The
microlens package keeps Names in a Set and later turns that set into a list.
The results have different orders of TyVars resulting in different ABI hashes
and can potentially be optimized differently.
I believe it's worth to handle this case in a deterministic way and I have a
solution in mind. The idea is to extend NameU (and potentially NameL) with an
ordering key. To be more concrete:
- | NameU !Int
+ | NameU !Int !Int
This way the Ord instance can use a stable key and the problem reduces to
ensuring the keys are stable. To generate stable keys we can use the fact that
reify traverses the expressions in the same order every time and sequentially
allocate new keys based on traversal order. The way I have it implemented now
is to add a new field in TcGblEnv which maps Uniques to allocated keys:
+ tcg_th_names :: TcRef (UniqFM Int, Int),
Then the reifyName and qNewName do the necessary bookkeeping and
Excerpts from Michael Sloan's message of 2016-06-04 18:44:03 -0700: this the though, that's then translate
the
Uniques on the fly.
This is a breaking change and it doesn't fix the problem that NameFlavour is
not abstract and leaks the Uniques. It would break at least:
- singletons
- th-lift
- haskell-src-meta
- shakespeare
- distributed-closure
I'd like to get feedback if this is an acceptable solution and if the problem
is worth solving.
Cheers,
Bartosz
[1]
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DeterministicBuilds#NondeterministicUn...
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs <
participants (5)
-
Bartosz Nitka
-
Edward Z. Yang
-
Michael Sloan
-
Richard Eisenberg
-
Simon Peyton Jones