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    Implement cardinality analysis · 99d4e5b4
    Simon Peyton Jones authored
    This major patch implements the cardinality analysis described
    in our paper "Higher order cardinality analysis". It is joint
    work with Ilya Sergey and Dimitrios Vytiniotis.
    
    The basic is augment the absence-analysis part of the demand
    analyser so that it can tell when something is used
    	 never
    	 at most once
     	 some other way
    
    The "at most once" information is used
        a) to enable transformations, and
           in particular to identify one-shot lambdas
        b) to allow updates on thunks to be omitted.
    
    There are two new flags, mainly there so you can do performance
    comparisons:
        -fkill-absence   stops GHC doing absence analysis at all
        -fkill-one-shot  stops GHC spotting one-shot lambdas
                         and single-entry thunks
    
    The big changes are:
    
    * The Demand type is substantially refactored.  In particular
      the UseDmd is factored as follows
          data UseDmd
            = UCall Count UseDmd
            | UProd [MaybeUsed]
            | UHead
            | Used
    
          data MaybeUsed = Abs | Use Count UseDmd
    
          data Count = One | Many
    
      Notice that UCall recurses straight to UseDmd, whereas
      UProd goes via MaybeUsed.
    
      The "Count" embodies the "at most once" or "many" idea.
    
    * The demand analyser itself was refactored a lot
    
    * The previously ad-hoc stuff in the occurrence analyser for foldr and
      build goes away entirely.  Before if we had build (\cn -> ...x... )
      then the "\cn" was hackily made one-shot (by spotting 'build' as
      special.  That's essential to allow x to be inlined.  Now the
      occurrence analyser propagates info gotten from 'build's stricness
      signature (so build isn't special); and that strictness sig is
      in turn derived entirely automatically.  Much nicer!
    
    * The ticky stuff is improved to count single-entry thunks separately.
    
    One shortcoming is that there is no DEBUG way to spot if an
    allegedly-single-entry thunk is acually entered more than once.  It
    would not be hard to generate a bit of code to check for this, and it
    would be reassuring.  But it's fiddly and I have not done it.
    
    Despite all this fuss, the performance numbers are rather under-whelming.
    See the paper for more discussion.
    
           nucleic2          -0.8%    -10.9%      0.10      0.10     +0.0%
             sphere          -0.7%     -1.5%      0.08      0.08     +0.0%
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                Min          -4.7%    -10.9%     -9.3%     -9.3%    -50.0%
                Max          -0.4%     +0.5%     +2.2%     +2.3%     +7.4%
     Geometric Mean          -0.8%     -0.2%     -1.3%     -1.3%     -1.8%
    
    I don't quite know how much credence to place in the runtime changes,
    but movement seems generally in the right direction.
    99d4e5b4