Unpack primitive types by default in data

[John Meacham]

FWIW

jhc has always unboxed everything smaller or equal to the size of a pointer
unconditionally. It's all about the cache performance.

    John

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been thinking about this some more and I think we should
> definitely unpack primitive types (e.g. Int, Word, Float, Double,
> Char) by default.
>
> The worry is that reboxing will cost us, but I realized today that at
> least one other language, Java, does this already today and even
> though it hurts performance in some cases, it seems to be a win on
> average. In Java all primitive fields get auto-boxed/unboxed when
> stored in polymorphic fields (e.g. in a HashMap which stores keys and
> fields as Object pointers.) This seems analogous to our case, except
> we might also unbox when calling lazy functions.
>
> Here's an idea of how to test this hypothesis:
>
>  1. Get a bunch of benchmarks.
>  2. Change GHC to make UNPACK a no-op for primitive types (as library
> authors have already worked around the lack of unpacking by using this
> pragma.)
>  3. Run the benchmarks.
>  4. Change GHC to always unpack primitive types (regardless of the
> presence of an UNPACK pragma.)
>  5. Run the benchmarks.
>  6. Compare the results.
>
> Number (1) might be what's keeping us back right now, as we feel that
> we don't have a good benchmark set. I suggest we try with nofib first
> and see if there's a different and then move on to e.g. the shootout
> benchmarks.
>
> I imagine that ignoring UNPACK pragmas selectively wouldn't be too
> hard. Where the relevant code?
>
> Cheers,
> Johan
>
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