the arc of software bends towards understanding
(Guess what Edward has in a week: Exams! The theming of these posts might have something to do with that...) At this point in my life, I’ve taken a course on introductory artificial intelligence twice. (Not my fault: I happened to have taken MIT’s version before going to Cambridge, which also administers this material as […]
Another common thunk leak arises from mapping functions over containers, which do not execute their combining function strictly. The usual fix is to instead use a strict version of the function, ala foldl' or insertWith', or perhaps using a completely strict version of the structure. In today’s post, we’ll look at this situation more closely. […]
Yesterday we had guest speaker Byron Cook come in to give a talk about SLAM, a nice real-world example of theorem proving technology being applied to device drivers. Having worked in the trenches, Byron had some very hilarious (and interesting) quips about device driver development. After all, when a device driver crashes, it's not the […]
Recursion is one of those things that functional programming languages shine at—but it seems a bit disappointing that in many cases, you have to convert your beautiful recursive function back into iterative form. After all, iteration is what imperative languages do best, right? Actually, explicitly tail-recursive functions in functional programming languages can be fairly beautiful: […]
This is an addendum to my second example in Anatomy of a thunk leak, in which I’d like to propose another solution to the space leak, involving computing the composition of all of these thunks. This solution is particularly notable because it preserves the denotation of the original function, that is, that f l (undefined, […]
In this post, we discuss the characteristics of a thunk leak, the leak that has come to symbolize the difficulties of “reasoning about space usage” in Haskell. I’ll consider a few examples of this type of leak and argue that these leaks are actually trivial to fix. Rather, the difficulty is when a thunk leak […]
A big thanks to everyone who everyone who sent in space leak specimens. All of the leaks have been inspected and cataloged by our experts, and we are quite pleased to open the doors of the space leak zoo to the public! There are a few different types of space leak here, but they are […]
Short post, longer ones in progress. One of the really neat things about the Par monad is how it explicitly reifies laziness, using a little structure called an IVar (also known in the literature as I-structures). An IVar is a little bit like an MVar, except that once you’ve put a value in one, you […]
I’m currently collecting non-stack-overflow space leaks, in preparation for a future post in the Haskell Heap series. If you have any interesting space leaks, especially if they’re due to laziness, send them my way. Here’s what I have so far (unverified: some of these may not leak or may be stack overflows. I’ll be curating […]
New to the series? Go to the beginning. Today, we discuss how presents on the Haskell Heap are named, whether by top-level bindings, let-bindings or arguments. We introduce the Expression-Present Equivalent Exchange, which highlights the fact that expressions are also thunks on the Haskell heap. Finally, we explain how this let-bindings inside functions can result […]