Putting the Spine Back in the Spineless Tagless G-Machine - An Implementation of Resumable Black-Holes
Alastair Reid
Yale University
[pdf]
[doi]
Implementation of Functional Languages, 10th International Workshop (IFL'98) Selected Papers
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 1595
London, UK
September 1998
Abstract
Interrupt handling is a tricky business in lazy functional
languages: we have to make sure that thunks that are being evaluated can
be halted and later restarted if and when they are required. This is
a particular problem for implementations which use black-holing.
Black-Holing deliberately makes it impossible to revert such thunks
to their original state to avoid a serious space leak. Interactive
Haskell implementations such as Hugs and hbi catch interrupts and
avoid the problem by omitting or disabling black-holing. Batch mode
Haskell implementations such as HBC and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler
(GHC) avoid this problem by disabling black-holing or by providing no
way to catch interrupts. This paper describes a modification to GHC’s
abstract machine (the Spineless Tagless G-Machine) which
simultaneously supports both interrupts and black-holing.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/ifl/Reid98
, abstract = {
Interrupt handling is a tricky business in lazy functional
languages: we have to make sure that thunks that are being evaluated can
be halted and later restarted if and when they are required. This is
a particular problem for implementations which use black-holing.
Black-Holing deliberately makes it impossible to revert such thunks
to their original state to avoid a serious space leak. Interactive
Haskell implementations such as Hugs and hbi catch interrupts and
avoid the problem by omitting or disabling black-holing. Batch mode
Haskell implementations such as HBC and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler
(GHC) avoid this problem by disabling black-holing or by providing no
way to catch interrupts. This paper describes a modification to GHC's
abstract machine (the Spineless Tagless G-Machine) which
simultaneously supports both interrupts and black-holing.}
, affiliation = {Yale University}
, ar_file = {IFL_98}
, ar_shortname = {IFL 98}
, author = {Alastair Reid}
, booktitle = {Implementation of Functional Languages, 10th International Workshop
(IFL'98) Selected Papers}
, day = {9-11}
, doi = {10.1007/3-540-48515-5\_12}
, editor = {Kevin Hammond and
Antony J. T. Davie and
Chris Clack}
, file = {spine-ifl98.pdf}
, location = {London, UK}
, month = {September}
, pages = {186--199}
, png = {spine-ifl98.png}
, publisher = {Springer}
, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}
, title = {{P}utting the {S}pine {B}ack in the {S}pineless {T}agless {G}-Machine: {A}n {I}mplementation
of {R}esumable {B}lack-{H}oles}
, volume = {1595}
, year = {1998}
}
