fusion-plugin

Motivation
The goal of stream fusion is to eliminate constructors of
internal state used in a stream. For example, in case of
streamly streams, the
constructors of Step
type, Yield
, Skip
and Stop
would get
eliminated by fusion. Similarly, constructors of any other intermediate
state types get eliminated when stream fusion works correctly. See the papers
in the reference section for more details on stream fusion.
Stream fusion depends on the GHC case-of-case transformations
eliminating intermediate constructors. Case-of-case transformation in
turn depends on inlining. During core-to-core transformations GHC may
create several internal bindings (e.g. join points) which may not get
inlined because their size is too big. Even though we know that after
fusion the resulting code would be smaller and more efficient. The
programmer cannot force inlining of these bindings as there is no way
for the programmer to address these bindings at the source level because
they are internal, generated during core-to-core transformations. As a result
stream fusion fails unpredictably depending on whether GHC was able to inline
the internal bindings or not.
See GHC ticket #17075 for
more details.
Solution
This plugin provides the programmer with a way to annotate certain types
using a Fuse
pragma. The programmer would annotate the types that are
to be eliminated by fusion. During the simplifier phase the plugin goes through
the relevant bindings and if one of these types are found inside a binding then
that binding is marked to be inlined irrespective of the size.
Using the plugin
This plugin was primarily motivated by
streamly but it can be used in
general.
To use this plugin, add this package to your build-depends
and pass the following to your ghc-options: ghc-options: -O2 -fplugin=Fusion.Plugin
Contributing
All contributions are welcome! The code is available under BSD-3
license on github. In
case you have any questions or suggestions please contact Pranay
Sashank, the author and
maintainer of this plugin.
We would be happy to see this work getting integrated with GHC as a fix for
GHC ticket #17075, any help
with that would be appreciated.
References