Haskell Interlude 60: Tom Ellis

[Tritlo]

Tom Ellis

Tom Ellis works at Groq, using Haskell to compile AI models to specialized hardware. In this episode, we talk about stability of both GHC and Haskell libraries, effects, and strictness, and the premise of functional programming: make invalid states and invalid laziness unrepresentable!

[atravers]

Promoting Non-Strict Programming, Olaf Chitil (2006)

[…] I suspect that space leaks often occur because functions are not non-strict enough. When strict and non-strict functions are mixed, intermediate data structures have to be constructed completely and then they use significant amounts of space. Similarly a single strict function in a sequential composition of functions can destroy the desired online behaviour of a program.

So the programmer has to identify functions that are too strict, that consume large parts of their arguments to produce small parts of their results. Such a function should be redefined less strictly. Here I present a tool, a Haskell library, that semi-automatically identifies such problematic functions amongst a large number and that suggest how the function could be less strict. The aim is to provide a tool that supports programming for non-strictness and thus modularity.