[Haskell-cafe] Boxed Mutable Arrays

[Brad Larsen]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Serguey Zefirov <sergueyz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If the number of buckets was fixed, one could use an array of STRefs
>>> to lists.  I believe this would avoid the bug from Ticket #650?
>> now i see what you mean. no, i mean trivial transformation. #650 says
>> about slow GC. why it's slow? because once you made any update to the
>> array, the entire array is marked as updated and scanned on next minor GC
>> (which occurs after every 512 kbytes allocated, afaik). let's replace
>> big array (say, of 10,000 elements) with array of 100 arrays of 100
>> elements each. now, between minor GCs only some of arrays will be
>> changed and entire amount of memory to be scanned will become less
>
> Data.IntMap?
>

I want to implement a more-or-less traditional, mutable, imperative
hash table in the ST monad.  Hence, I'm not considering Data.IntMap
and other persistent tree structures for its implementation, although
I have thought about it.

The bug described in Ticket #650, AFAICS, prevents implementation of a
reasonable, generic hash table in Haskell.  :-(