On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 08:28:51PM +0000, Frederik Eaton wrote:
What is the status of Rob Ennals' optimistic evaluation work? I'm told that it has been removed from GHC. This is extremely depressing to me. Without such a feature available, it becomes very difficult to write programs that process large amounts of data in Haskell. In many such applications, strictness annotations become not just important for performance, but necessary to get a program to function at all.
With optimistic evaluation, GHC and Haskell would have been at least potential candidates for my programming work in machine learning; without it I fear that this is no longer the case.
Will optimistic evaluation ever be present in GHC again? What is its priority, compared to other features which are being implemented? What was the last (if any) version of GHC with optimistic evaluation present?
I am not sure this is similar to optimistic evaluation, but I was wondering if it would be possible to find space-leaks at runtime and try to reduce them. There's also a related idea to decrease the priority of garbage producing threads (and/or increase for garbage reducing threads). This way it would be possible to make the idiomatic Haskell 'wc' (word count) implementation space efficient with some simple 'par' annotations: main = do cs <- getContents let nChars = length cs nWords = length (words cs) nLines = length (lines cs) (nChars `par` nWords `par` nLines) `seq` return () print (nChars, nWords, nLines) (I am not sure I used "par" correctly, but I hope you know what I mean). Best regards Tomasz -- I am searching for programmers who are good at least in (Haskell || ML) && (Linux || FreeBSD || math) for work in Warsaw, Poland