Committee,

Proposal #367 suggests using unboxed sums for the results of 7 (seven) primops that use sum types but currently have to encode those explicitly using `Int#`.

https://github.com/treeowl/ghc-proposals/blob/unboxed-sum-primops/proposals/0000-unboxed-sum-primops.md

The proposal is arguably the right thing, however I'm suggesting we reject it for the following reasons:
  1. The implementations of the primops would bake in the translation of unboxed sums. Right now our unboxed sum translation is defined in one place - CorePrep - but this proposal would leak it into the implementations of a few primops.
  2. Migration would entail adding a backwards-compatibility layer, with the associated complexity and risk of performance regressions.
  3. While the current situation is perhaps inelegant, it's not broken and it's easy to understand.
Thoughts?

Simon


On Sun, 4 Oct 2020 at 22:14, Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
Dear Committee,

this is your secretary speaking:

Clarify primops using unboxed sum
has been proposed by David Feuer
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/367
https://github.com/treeowl/ghc-proposals/blob/unboxed-sum-primops/proposals/0000-unboxed-sum-primops.md

I’ll propose Simon Marlow as the shepherd.

Please guide us to a conclusion as outlined in
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals#committee-process

Thanks,
Joachim
--
Joachim Breitner
  mail@joachim-breitner.de
  http://www.joachim-breitner.de/


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