Skip to content

Eta expand PAPs

SPJ writes in ticket:10260#comment:98737:

But see this note in SimplUtils:

Note [Do not eta-expand PAPs]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We used to have old_arity = manifestArity rhs, which meant that we
would eta-expand even PAPs.  But this gives no particular advantage,
and can lead to a massive blow-up in code size, exhibited by Trac #9020.
Suppose we have a PAP
    foo :: IO ()
    foo = returnIO ()
Then we can eta-expand do
    foo = (\eta. (returnIO () |> sym g) eta) |> g
where
    g :: IO () ~ State# RealWorld -> (# State# RealWorld, () #)

But there is really no point in doing this, and it generates masses of
coercions and whatnot that eventually disappear again. For T9020, GHC
allocated 6.6G beore, and 0.8G afterwards; and residency dropped from
1.8G to 45M.

But note that this won't eta-expand, say
  f = \g -> map g
Does it matter not eta-expanding such functions?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps
strictness analysis will have less to bite on?

The worse code for the un-eta-expanded code for last is perhaps an example of the last paragraph!

And yet the comment is reasonably convincing. I'm not sure what to do here.

One thing that might be worth trying is to eta-expand as far as poss without bumping into a coercion. That would expand last but not foo. Want to try that? We may fix last but there are sure to be other cases, and the more robust the optimisations the better.

Trac metadata
Trac field Value
Version 7.10.1
Type Task
TypeOfFailure OtherFailure
Priority normal
Resolution Unresolved
Component Compiler
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system
Architecture
To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information