Nathan,
I'm interested in research relating to memory management in Haskell. I'm at the point where I don't know enough to have very specific questions, but I'm especially interested in garbage collection in Haskell, and any available statistics (such as, how long does a thunk typically live before its evaluated, after its evaluated?), or tools that would let me get that sort of information more easily. If any one could be so kind as to point me to relevant research papers or other documentation, it would be very much appreciated.
In the early to mid '90s we built various heap-profiling tools to examine the characteristics of heap data in lazy functional programs. You can find papers describing this work by Googling "heap profiling". You may be particularly interested in the investigation of "heap lag" and "heap drag" -- see for example the ICFP'96 paper. Others have worked on similar tools since, but I'm not sure how extensive heap profiling facilities are in ghc, the most widely used implementation of Haskell.
Regards Colin R _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
