On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Don Stewart
cjs:
On 2010-03-01 19:37 +0000 (Mon), Thomas Schilling wrote:
A possible workaround would be to sprinkle lots of 'rnf's around your code....
As I learned rather to my chagrin on a large project, you generally don't want to do that. I spent a couple of days writing instance of NFData and loading up my application with rnfs and then watched performance fall into a sinkhole.
I believe that the problem is that rnf traverses the entirety of a large data structure even if it's already strict and doesn't need traversal. My guess is that doing this frequently on data structures (such as Maps) of less than tiny size was blowing out my cache.
And rnf will do the traversal whether it is needed or not. Imo, it is better to ensure the structures you want are necessarily strict by definition, so that only the minimum additional evaluation is necessary.
Isn't the downside of strict structures the implicit nature of the 'strictification'? You lose the fine grained control of when particular values should be strict. Jason