Abstract
Lazy evaluation has many advantages, but it can cause bad performance. Consequently, Haskell allows users to force eager evaluation at certain program points by inserting strictness annotations, known and written as bangs (!). Unfortunately, manual bang placement is difficult. Autobahn 1.0 uses a genetic algorithm to infer bang annotations that improve performance. However, Autobahn 1.0 often generates large numbers of superfluous bangs, which is problematic because users must inspect each such bang to determine whether it is safe. We introduce Autobahn 2.0, which uses GHC profiling information to reduce the number of superfluous bangs. When evaluated on the NoFib benchmark suite, Autobahn 2.0 reduced the number of inferred bangs by 90.2% on average, while only degrading program performance by 15.7% compared with the performance produced by Autobahn 1.0. In a case study on a garbage collection simulator, Autobahn 2.0 eliminated 81.8% of the recommended bangs, with the same 15.7% optimization degradation.
- Nathan P. Ricci, Samuel Z. Guyer, and J. Eliot B. Moss. 2013. Elephant Tracks: Portable Production of Complete and Precise GC Traces. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 109-118. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Yisu Remy Wang, Diogenes Nunez, and Kathleen Fisher. 2016. Autobahn: Using Genetic Algorithms to Infer Strictness Annotations. In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Haskell (Haskell '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 114-126. Google Scholar
Digital Library
Index Terms
Autobahn 2.0: minimizing bangs while maintaining performance (system demonstration)
Recommendations
Autobahn 2.0: minimizing bangs while maintaining performance (system demonstration)
Haskell 2018: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on HaskellLazy evaluation has many advantages, but it can cause bad performance. Consequently, Haskell allows users to force eager evaluation at certain program points by inserting strictness annotations, known and written as bangs (!). Unfortunately, manual bang ...
Autobahn: using genetic algorithms to infer strictness annotations
Haskell 2016: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on HaskellAlthough laziness enables beautiful code, it comes with non-trivial performance costs. The ghc compiler for Haskell has optimizations to reduce those costs, but the optimizations are not sufficient. As a result, Haskell also provides a variety of ...
Autobahn: using genetic algorithms to infer strictness annotations
Haskell '16Although laziness enables beautiful code, it comes with non-trivial performance costs. The ghc compiler for Haskell has optimizations to reduce those costs, but the optimizations are not sufficient. As a result, Haskell also provides a variety of ...







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