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Reflection without remorse: revealing a hidden sequence to speed up monadic reflection

Published:03 September 2014Publication History
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Abstract

A series of list appends or monadic binds for many monads performs algorithmically worse when left-associated. Continuation-passing style (CPS) is well-known to cure this severe dependence of performance on the association pattern. The advantage of CPS dwindles or disappears if we have to examine or modify the intermediate result of a series of appends or binds, before continuing the series. Such examination is frequently needed, for example, to control search in non-determinism monads.

We present an alternative approach that is just as general as CPS but more robust: it makes series of binds and other such operations efficient regardless of the association pattern-- and also provides efficient access to intermediate results. The key is to represent such a conceptual sequence as an efficient sequence data structure. Efficient sequence data structures from the literature are homogeneous and cannot be applied as they are in a type-safe way to series of monadic binds. We generalize them to type aligned sequences and show how to construct their (assuredly order-preserving) implementations. We demonstrate that our solution solves previously undocumented, severe performance problems in iteratees, LogicT transformers, free monads and extensible effects.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 49, Issue 12
      Haskell '14
      December 2014
      141 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2775050
      • Editor:
      • Andy Gill
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        Haskell '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell
        September 2014
        154 pages
        ISBN:9781450330411
        DOI:10.1145/2633357

      Copyright © 2014 ACM

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 3 September 2014

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