Dear Haskellers, Recently I have been looking for a programming language that would be suitable for small scientific and recreational projects and palatable to a picky person like me. (I do theoretical physics and some math; I do not program very often.) Haskell and Clean look attractive from a mathematician's point of view and allow for very elegant solutions in some cases. I tried Clean first because it has a more efficient implementation and better array support. However, I am leaning toward Haskell since it has more libraries, larger community, and some nice features (e.g., the "do" notation). I thought it would be easier to avoid errors when programming in a pure functional language. Indeed, the Haskell type system is great and catches many errors. But in practice, I found it very difficult to write correct programs in Haskell! This is because my definition of correctness includes asymptotic complexity (time and space). I have pondered why Haskell is so prone to space leaks and whether this can be fixed. I posted a related message (describing a space leak caused by inlining) to Glasgow-haskell-users, http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2009-November/018063.... but apparently the GHC developers were busy preparing a new release. Perhaps on Haskell-cafe there are more people with some spare time; I would really appreciate your comments. So, there seem to be several reasons why controlling space usage is difficult: 1) The operational semantics of Haskell is not specified. That said, it seems that unoptimized programs behave in a predictable way if you follow the execution step by step. The Clean report explicitly says that the execution model is graph reduction; I believe that Haskell uses the same model. However, there are some subtleties, e.g., the tail call and selector optimizations. (I read about the selector optimization in Wadler's paper, http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/garbage-collection.html and saw it mentioned on the GHC development page. It's really nice and indispensable, but it seems to be missing from the user documentation. Is this the following description accurate? After the rhs of a lazy pattern like (a,b) = expression has been evaluated, the pattern does not take up any space, and the space occupied by a and b can be reclaimed independently.) There must be more subtleties. I imagine that a rigorous definition of operational semantics would be too complicated and impractical. But maybe an informal specification is better than nothing? Why people have not attempted to write it? 2) While each step is predictable, the overall behavior of a lazy program can be rather surprising. So one must be very careful. GHC provides two ways to control the evaluation order, seq and bang patterns, but I am not sure which of these (if any) is the right tool. Consider the following example (from the Real World Haskell book): mean :: [Double] -> Double mean xs = sum / fromIntegral num where (num,sum) = foldl' f (0,0) xs :: (Int, Double) f (n,s) x = (n+1, s+x) Although it uses foldl', there is a space leak because Haskell tuples are not strict. There are two possible fixes: f (!n,!s) x = (n+1, s+x) or f (n,s) x = let n1=n+1; s1=s+x in n1 `seq` s1 `seq` (n1,s1) The first one is short, but less natural than the second one, where the offending thunks are suppressed on the spot. Unfortunately, the syntax is awkward; it would be nice to write something like f (n,s) x = (!n+1, !n+1) Well, I am becoming too grumpy, perhaps the bang patterns are fine. More important question: are there established practices to *avoid* space leaks rather than fixing them afterwards? 3) The standard library was not designed with space efficiency in mind; for example, there is sum but no sum'. 4) GHC does a pretty good job optimizing programs for speed, but compiling with the -O option can easily introduce a space leak. I have not encountered such problems with Clean, though my experience is very limited. Apparently, the Clean developers have disallowed some unsafe optimization, see e.g., this message: http://mailman.science.ru.nl/pipermail/clean-list/2009/004140.html I doubt that the Clean solution is 100% reliable because the compiler still uses strictness analysis, which can change the asymptotic space usage (usually for better, but sometimes for worse). So I wonder whether it would be feasible to identify a set of conservative optimizations that do not change the space or time usage more than by a constant factor. For example, the strictness analysis could be limited to fixed-size data. Or instead of strictness analysis, one could inline the top-level patterns of every function. Of course, that would make the optimization less efficient on the average, but predictability is more important. Best regards, Alexei