Ronald Guida wrote:
So I just thought of something. If laziness leads to laziness leaks,
then is there such a thing as a strictness leak? I realized that the
answer is yes.
A lazy leak is a situation where I'm wasting resources to delay a
sequence of calculations instead of just doing them now. But in a
strict language, I might waste resources to compute things that I'll
never need. I would call that a strictness leak.
Now I could ask the dual question, "How do I detect strictness leaks,"
and I would probably get the same answers: profiling, looking at
object code, and being explicit about the evaluation strategy.
Both types of leaks share a lot in common. In both cases, I'm wasting
resources. If I have a real-time system, then either type of leak can
cause me to a miss a deadline.
I haven't heard the terms "laziness leak" and "strictness leak" before,
imho they sound a bit spooky because it's not clear to me what the
situation without leak would be. (Time vs Space? Is an O(n) algorithm a
strictness leak compared to an O(log n) algorithm?)
Note that lazy evaluation never wastes time; evaluating a term with lazy
evaluation will always take less reduction steps than doing so eagerly
or partly eagerly. But it can waste space (-> "space leak"), for
instance by accumulating a big expression like
(..) -> ((..)+1) -> (((..) + 1) + 1) -> etc.
instead of evaluating x+1 immediately
5 -> 6 -> 7 -> etc.
However, this would be wasted time in case the whole expression will not
be evaluated but just thrown away. So, it's a trade-off.
The effect you have in mind only appears in real-time systems, where
lazy evaluation procrastinates everything by default. So, trying to
implement a real-time system in a lazy language is more or less a
paradox :) as Okasaki already points out in his book.
Eager evaluation may "waste" both time and space compared to alternative
course of reduction.
Regards,
apfelmus
PS: The reduction strategies we compare to don't evaluate under lambdas.
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