Ronald Guida wrote:
I need some help with space and time leaks.
I know of two types of space leak. The first type of leak occurs when a function uses unnecessary stack or heap space.
GHCi> sum [1..10^6] *** Exception: stack overflow
Apparently, the default definition for "sum" has a space leak. I can define my own sum in terms of strict foldl ...
sum' xs = foldl' (+) 0 xs
... and it doesn't overflow the stack.
GHCi> sum' [1..10^6] 500000500000 (0.27 secs, 112403416 bytes)
But it fills the heap? My intuition is that foldr (+) 0 [1..10^6] is the fusion of a good producer and consumer so no heap is wasted constructing [1..10^6] but the stack is instead filled with (1+),(2+),...,(999999+) unary functions, whereas foldl' (+) 0 [1..10^6] does not fill the stack with anything but does fill the heap with [1..10^6] because foldl' is no longer a good consumer? If so, it seems that the stack is smaller than the heap (or else the size of (1+) is much larger than that the element of an [Int]. Anyone know the truth of any of this?