unsafePerformIO prevents space leak?
Sadly, I don't have a concrete testcase for this, but I've fixed this issue in the Bluespec compiler more than once, so I have a strong suspicion that there's a GHC bug (or lack of optimization) going on here.
The basic situation is that I have a deeply nested structures of IORefs (I once measured one particular instance as including chains over 300 IORefs deep). I want to walk this structure recursively (it does not contain loops) without mutating it to compute a property of this structure. Generally speaking I'm either looking to accumulate certain kinds of nodes or I'm looking to detect the presence or absence of a certain kind of node.
If I traverse this structure in the IO monad (using readIORef directly and recursing and combining using things like mapM and foldM) I see a huge space leak (which can be confirmed with profiling). If I take the same traversal and wrap up the readIORef inside an unsafePerformIO (and change mapM to map and the like) the space leak disappears. This surprised me because I thought it would be the sort of thing GHC could figure out.
I'm sorry I can't easily give you a testcase, but I hope I've included enough detail that you have a fighting chance of reproducing it. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Trac metadata
| Trac field | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | 6.8.2 |
| Type | Bug |
| TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
| Priority | normal |
| Resolution | Unresolved |
| Component | Compiler |
| Test case | |
| Differential revisions | |
| BlockedBy | |
| Related | |
| Blocking | |
| CC | |
| Operating system | |
| Architecture | Multiple |