On 2017-01-19 02:57 PM, David Feuer wrote:
2. Leaves are really painful. Data structures that store at most one element per leaf make obvious traversals expensive. For example, in Data.Map, the obvious implementation would be
instance Traversable (Map k) where traverse _ Tip = pure Tip traverse f (Bin s k v l r) = liftA3 (Bin s k) (f v) (traverse f l) (traverse f r)
The trouble is that we would generate a slew of `pure Tip`s that we'd then have to combine. For instance, (Bin 1 k v Tip Tip) would give liftA3 (Bin 1 k) (f v) (pure Tip) (pure Tip)
It makes me rather sad to have to write disgustingly ugly Traversable instances just to avoid silly performance issues like this. Does anyone have an idea for fixing (2), and ideally simultaneously taking care of (1)?
I can't offer any immediate fix, but my impression of problem (2) is that it's for compiler to solve. I doesn't seem right that you should be manually enumerating all the simple cases close to the tips and inlining them explicitly. Since traverse is forcing the entire spine of the Map, there is not issue with the change in strictness. The compiler should in principle be smart enough to enumerate all possible node shapes and expand the function definitions for each of them. It would be similar to loop unrolling in some ways. Since this kind of transformation would probably be expensive at compile-time and would increase the generated code size, it should likely require a command-line option (-O2) or a pragma to activate. In short, the solution to problem #2 is to log a GHC proposal and get the burden off your shoulders.