[Haskell-cafe] Re: Incremental array updates

Eugene Kirpichov wrote:

You need to use STUArray. The Data.Array completely-immutable-and-boxed arrays are ok only for tasks where you build an array once and don't modify it, and where you need array elements to be lazy. The // operation creates a copy of the whole array with one element modified. It should probably be called "turtleSlowCopyWholeArrayAndModifySingleElement".

Thanks for the hint! However, I still don't see why this increments memory usage so much... Shouldn't even in this case the garbage collector remove the old, no longer needed versions of the array? My main point of concern is not that the program may run slowly, but that it uses that much memory. But of course for the real program this hint is surely very useful! I'll give it a try... Thanks, Daniel

2009/2/26 Daniel Kraft :

...

Hi,

I seem to be a little stuck with incremental array updates... I've got an array of "few" (some thousand) integers, but have to do a calculation where I incrementally build up the array. For sake of simplicity, for now I don't use a State-Monad but simply pass the array as state down the recursive calls.

Unfortunatelly, I seem to experience problems with lazyness; when I run my program, memory usage goes up to horrific values! The simple program below reproduces this; when run on my machine, it uses up about 300 MB of real and 300 MB of virtual memory, and the system starts swapping like mad! I compiled with ghc --make -O3, ghc version 6.8.3 if that matters.

BTW, I tried to make the array update strict using the `seq` as below, but with no effect... What am I doing wrong here?

Many thanks, Daniel

import Data.Array;

arraySize = 1000 limit = 100000

type MyArray = Array Int Int

emptyArray :: MyArray emptyArray = array (0, arraySize - 1) [ (i, 0) | i <- [0 .. arraySize - 1] ]

procOne :: Int -> MyArray -> MyArray procOne a cnt | a > limit = cnt | otherwise = let ind = a `mod` arraySize oldcnt = cnt ! ind newarr = cnt // [(ind, oldcnt + 1)] in procOne (a + 1) (newarr `seq` newarr)

main :: IO () main = do arr <- return $ procOne 0 emptyArray print $ arr ! 42

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