[Haskell-cafe] Optmiization of recursion
Iavor S. Diatchki
diatchki at cse.ogi.edu
Tue Sep 28 02:54:48 EDT 2004
John Goerzen wrote:
>As I'm investigating Haskell, it's occured to me that most of the
>Haskell tutorials out there have omitted something that was quite
>prominent in the OCaml material I had read: making functions properly
>The OCaml compiler was able to optimize tail-recursive functions such
>that they could be compiled using a loop. This would achieve two main
>benefits: performance due to not needing to allocate/deallocate stack
>frames, and the ability to work on very large lists since each recursive
>call did not consume extra stack space.
>So I have several questions about Haskell:
>1. Do Haskell interpreters/compilers perform similar optimizations?
yes they do. most functional language compilers do this sort of thing.
>2. If the answer to 1 is No, then am I correct in saying that my ability
>to handle very large lists in recursive functions is limited by the
>maximum stack size on my system?
if they answer was no, perhaps that would be the case, but with lazyness
things get weird.
may experience is that it is somehow a lot easier for me to run out of
space when writing
ML programs (this could be because i probably think in Haskell). the
reason is that
in ML sometimes things get evaluated, when in haskell you would simply
acllocate a closure on the heap.
OTOH there are a few classical cases in haskell where you run out of
space even if you have a tail
recursive function: e.g.
sum n  = n
sum n (y:ys) = sum (n + y) ys
the reason for this that the n+y expression never gets evaluated until
the very end,
so you create many suspensions in memory.
>3. Does it make a difference for optimization purposes whether a
>particular recursive function is tail-recursive?
yes, in a tail recursive call you can reuse your stack frame, so the
call becomes simply
a jump (i.e. you get a loop).
>4. Is a reference available documenting which Prelude/standard functions
>are properly tail-recursive (and thus suitable for very large lists) and
>which are not? (OCaml system docs generally specify when a function is
>not tail-recursive... for instance, one of foldr/foldl is and the other
i am not sure if there is such a thing, but one can often guess.
for the record, foldl is the tail recursive one (it captures the pattern
of traversing a list with an acumulator)
while foldr is not.
>5. Are there any examples/patterns anywhere that illustrate standard
>tail-recursion practice in Haskell?
i'd imagine these would be much the same as in o'caml.
a common functional programming pattern when you get tail recursion is
to rewrite a function using an accumulator (i.e. a bit of local state).
hope this helps
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