
So, I have an optimization/internals question. Does the GHC API have any hooks for being able to revert a CAF to the original expression, thus discarding the previously computed result? The reason I'm wanting this is that I have a particular CAF which is an infinite list. Unfolding that list takes a fair deal of work, so we want to share it whenever possible; however it doesn't take an overwhelming amount of work, so if we know we've evaluated more of the list than necessary (for a long while), it'd be nice to be able to revert the evaluation in order to save on memory overhead (e.g., by calling relax :: IO()). I could hack something together based on unsafePerformIO and top-level IORefs, and it's clear that this is in fact a safe thing to do, but I'm worried about the semantic issues inherent in unsafePerformIOed top-level IORefs (e.g., the fact that their scope isn't particularly well defined: is it per library instance? per runtime?...). Unfortunately, for what I'm doing, it isn't really feasible to just leave the IO type in there nor to pass around the infinite list so we can use scoping rules to decide when to free it. (Feel free to offer alternative suggestions to handling this situation too.) -- Live well, ~wren