Specializing functions with implicit parameters

14 Mar 2020

      Hi all,

I discovered today that GHC never specializes functions with implicit parameters. This is not that surprising—I wouldn’t expect GHC to specialize the implicit parameters themselves—but it’s unfortunate because it means a single implicit parameter somewhere can transitively destroy specialization that would otherwise be very helpful.

Is there any obstacle to specializing these functions’ other dictionaries and leaving the implicit parameters alone? That is, if I have a function

    foo :: (?foo :: Bool, Show a) => a -> String

could GHC specialize `foo @Int` to

    foo :: (?foo :: Bool) => Int -> String

treating the implicit parameter little differently from an ordinary function argument?

As far as I can tell, there isn’t any real obstacle to doing this, so unless I’m missing something, I might give it a try myself. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything before diving in.

Thanks,
Alexis

Alexis King

Sandy Maguire

Alexis King

Carter Schonwald

Simon Peyton Jones

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