[Haskell-cafe] Haskell on JVM

[John A. De Goes]

JVM 7 has tail calls, and if you don't want to wait for that, "goto"  
works perfectly well for self-recursive functions. Other techniques  
can deal with mutual recursion, albeit at the cost of performance.

Regards,

John A. De Goes
N-Brain, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration

http://www.n-brain.net    |    877-376-2724 x 101

On Jun 26, 2009, at 6:26 AM, Maarten Hazewinkel wrote:

>
> On 26 Jun 2009, at 14:09, Timo B. Hübel wrote:
>
>> And here comes my question: If there is anybody with proper  
>> knowledge about
>> this issue, I would really like to know what are those things that  
>> are
>> missing? For example, Clojure lacks proper tail recrusion  
>> optimization due to
>> some missing functionality in the JVM. But does anybody know the  
>> details?
>
> Basically, the JVM lacks a native ability to do tail calls. It does  
> not have an
> instruction to remove/replace a stack frame without executing an  
> actual return
> to the calling method/function.
>
> With the heavy use of recursion in functional programs, this is an  
> important
> feature in a language implementation to avoid stack overflows.
>
> Some language implementations (Scala) can do partial workarounds by  
> turning
> the generated code into a loop in the compiler, but this is  
> frequently limited
> to only deal with self-recursive calls, and does not deal with the  
> general case
> (X-calls-Y-calls-Z-calls-X...), which a proper implementation of  
> tail-calls at
> the JVM level would allow.
>
> At the JIT level (below the JVM spec level) some implementations may  
> actually do
> the tail call optimization anyway, but this is beyond the control of  
> a language
> implementation, and would result in a situation where the behaviour  
> of your
> program depends on particular implementations/versions/parameters of  
> the JVM
> running it. That is something to be avoided if possible.
>
>
> Maarten Hazewinkel
> maarten.hazewinkel at gmail.com
>
>
>
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