Article

Faster laziness using dynamic pointer tagging

Authors:

Simon Marlow,

Alexey Rodriguez Yakushev,

Simon Peyton JonesAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Pages 277 - 288

https://doi.org/10.1145/1291151.1291194

Published: 01 October 2007 Publication History

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Abstract

In the light of evidence that Haskell programs compiled by GHC exhibit large numbers of mispredicted branches on modern processors, we re-examine the "tagless" aspect of the STG-machine that GHC uses as its evaluation model.

We propose two tagging strategies: a simple strategy called semi-tagging that seeks to avoid one common source of unpredictable indirect jumps, and a more complex strategy called dynamic pointer-tagging that uses the spare low bits in a pointer to encode information about the pointed-to object. Both of these strategies have been implemented and exhaustively measured in the context of a production compiler, GHC, and the paper contains detailed descriptions of the implementations. Our measurements demonstrate significant performance improvements (14% for dynamic pointer-tagging with only a 2% increase in code size), and we further demonstrate that much of the improvement can be attributed to the elimination of mispredicted branch instructions.

As part of our investigations we also discovered that one optimisation in the STG-machine, vectored-returns, is no longer worthwhile and we explain why.

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Index Terms

Faster laziness using dynamic pointer tagging
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Source code generation
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages

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Published In

ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

October 2007

346 pages

ISBN:9781595938152

DOI:10.1145/1291151

General Chair:
Ralf Hinze
Universität Bonn, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Norman Ramsey
Harvard University, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 9
Proceedings of the ICFP '07 conference
September 2007
331 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1291220
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 01 October 2007

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ICFP07: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 1 - 3, 2007

Freiburg, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

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Gamari BDietz LDing CMaas M(2020)Alligator collector: a latency-optimized garbage collector for functional programming languagesProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3381898.3397214(87-99)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2020
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