#9545: Evaluate Takano Akio's foldrW/buildW fusion framework as a possible replacement for foldr/build -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: dfeuer | Owner: Type: task | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: libraries/base | Version: 7.9 Keywords: | Operating System: Architecture: Unknown/Multiple | Unknown/Multiple Difficulty: Project (more | Type of failure: than a week) | None/Unknown Blocked By: | Test Case: Related Tickets: | Blocking: | Differential Revisions: -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Takano Akio's [https://github.com/takano-akio/ww-fusion worker-wrapper fusion] modifies `foldr/build` fairly conservatively to allow safe fusion of `foldl` and friends without relying on arity analysis. This advantage is important for two reasons that I know of: 1. As discussed in Joachim Breitner's original paper, the current arity analysis is unable to infer arity correctly when facing certain forms of recursion. 2. The current arity analysis, and probably ''any'' practical arity analysis, depends on inlining to a degree that can sometimes be unhealthy. I would love to make functions like `hPutStr` fuse, but I suspect doing so safely at present would likely cause a code explosion—the function being folded is too large to want to inline to make it available for arity analysis following fusion. I don't understand it completely yet, but it looks like `foldrW/buildW` can eliminate a lot of this uncertainty. Furthermore, it appears that functions currently written using `foldr` in a "right-handed" way can remain unchanged, using an implementation of `foldr` in terms of `foldrW`. Only "left-handed" folds will need to be rewritten to take advantage of this framework, along with all the `build`s. That said, `foldrW/buildW` probably has its weaknesses too. The basic fusion rule looks like this. {{{#!hs {-# RULES "foldrW/buildW" forall f z (i :: Wrap f b) (g :: forall c g . (Wrap g c) -> (a -> c -> c) -> c -> c) . foldrW i f z (buildW g) = g i f z #-} }}} If `g` and `i` are not inlined sufficiently to merge with each other, I imagine this could produce worse results than `foldr/build` when the latter works properly. The only way to really get a feel for performance would be to carefully modify everything to work as well as it can with this framework and see how the results compare. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9545 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler