Skip to content
  • Simon Marlow's avatar
    [project @ 2003-05-14 09:13:52 by simonmar] · 7a236a56
    Simon Marlow authored
    Change the way SRTs are represented:
    
    Previously, the SRT associated with a function or thunk would be a
    sub-list of the enclosing top-level function's SRT.  But this approach
    can lead to lots of duplication: if a CAF is referenced in several
    different thunks, then it may appear several times in the SRT.
    Let-no-escapes compound the problem, because the occurrence of a
    let-no-escape-bound variable would expand to all the CAFs referred to
    by the let-no-escape.
    
    The new way is to describe the SRT associated with a function or thunk
    as a (pointer+offset,bitmap) pair, where the pointer+offset points
    into some SRT table (the enclosing function's SRT), and the bitmap
    indicates which entries in this table are "live" for this closure.
    The bitmap is stored in the 16 bits previously used for the length
    field, but this rarely overflows.  When it does overflow, we store the
    bitmap externally in a new "SRT descriptor".
    
    Now the enclosing SRT can be a set, hence eliminating the duplicates.
    
    Also, we now have one SRT per top-level function in a recursive group,
    where previously we used to have one SRT for the whole group.  This
    helps keep the size of SRTs down.
    
    Bottom line: very little difference most of the time.  GHC itself got
    slightly smaller.  One bad case of a module in GHC which had a huge
    SRT has gone away.
    
    While I was in the area:
    
      - Several parts of the back-end require bitmaps.  Functions for
        creating bitmaps are now centralised in the Bitmap module.
    
      - We were trying to be independent of word-size in a couple of
        places in the back end, but we've now abandoned that strategy so I
        simplified things a bit.
    7a236a56