Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: generic-deepseq 1.0.0.0

On 23 February 2012 22:09, Maxime Henrion wrote:

On Sun, 2012-02-19 at 21:06 +0100, Bas van Dijk wrote:

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On 19 February 2012 18:11, Maxime Henrion wrote:

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I'm guilty of not having preserved the "rnf :: a -> ()" function as the class function though, it's a wrapper around "deepseq" in my code. I just didn't see the point of having a class function with such a signature versus having a function just like "seq :: a -> b -> b". In retrospect, that might have been a bad idea, and maybe I should switch to have an "rnf :: a -> ()" class function to make switching even easier?

I'm not sure but maybe a method like "rnf :: a -> ()" is easier to optimize.

Also in my experience (with generics support in aeson and cereal) it's a very good idea (performance-wise) to INLINE your methods like I did in my previous message. Of course the only way to know for sure is the create some (criterion) benchmarks.

Well I wrote some dumb criterion benchmarks that run deepseq over increasingly bigger lists of numbers, and it appears that using rnf as the member function of the DeepSeq class indeed makes a _huge_ difference.

Nice, that's what I expected. Have you checked if adding INLINE pragma's helps even more? (I guess not since it's already on par with manual written code, as you mentioned) BTW I would also recommend making a benchmark for a big sum type. Some nitpicking: * In the instance: instance GDeepSeq U1 where grnf _ = () I think it makes sense to pattern match on the U1 constructor, as in: grnf U1 = (). I haven't checked if that's necessary but my fear is that assuming: data Unit = Unit deriving Generic; instance DeepSeq Unit rnf (⊥ :: Unit) would equal: () while I would expect it to equal ⊥. * Why do you have the instance: instance GDeepSeq V1 where grnf _ = () The only way to construct values of a void type is using ⊥. And I would expect that rnf ⊥ = ⊥, not (). I think the best thing is to just remove the V1 instance. Cheers, Bas