The monoid may be more efficient if the Foldable is constructed to take advantage of internal sharing.

-Edward

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 11:52 AM, David Feuer <david.feuer@gmail.com> wrote:

I guess these are equivalent to the simpler expressions

rnfLTR = foldl' (const rnf) ()
rnfRTL = foldr' (\x _ -> rnf x) ()

On Jul 13, 2016 11:16 PM, "David Feuer" <david.feuer@gmail.com> wrote:

As I describe in https://github.com/haskell/deepseq/issues/17 it is
possible to implement an NFData instance for any Foldable type, and we
can offer a function to help do that:

data Unit = Unit

instance Monoid Unit where
  mempty = Unit
  Unit `mappend` Unit = Unit -- strict in both arguments, unlike ()

rnfFoldable :: (Foldable f, NFData a) => f a -> ()
rnfFoldable xs = foldMap (\x -> rnf x `seq` Unit) xs `seq` ()

This could be used like so:

instance NFData a => NFData (F a) where
  rnf = rnfFoldable

This version forces from left to right. It would be possible to offer
another version that forces from right to left:

data Unit2 = Unit2

instance Monoid Unit2 where
  mempty = Unit2
  x `mappend` Unit2 = x `seq` Unit2

rnfFoldableRTL :: (Foldable f, NFData a) => f a -> ()
rnfFoldableRTL xs = foldMap (\x -> rnf x `seq` Unit2) xs `seq` ()

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