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Putting the Spine Back in the Spineless Tagless G-Machine: An Implementation of Resumable Black-Holes

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Implementation of Functional Languages (IFL 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1595))

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Abstract

Interrupt handling is a tricky business in lazy functional languages: we have to make sure that thunks that are being evaluated can be halted and later restarted if and when they are required. This is a particular problem for implementations which use black-holing. Black-Holing deliberately makes it impossible to revert such thunks to their original state to avoid a serious space leak. Interactive Haskell implementations such as Hugs and hbi catch interrupts and avoid the problem by omitting or disabling black-holing. Batch mode Haskell implementations such as HBC and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) avoid this problem by disabling black-holing or by providing no way to catch interrupts. This paper describes a modification to GHC’s abstract machine (the Spineless Tagless G-Machine) which simultaneously supports both interrupts and black-holing.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    Alastair Reid

Authors
  1. Alastair Reid
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, North Haugh, St Andrews, KY16 9SS, UK

    Kevin Hammond  & Tony Davie  & 

  2. Department of Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Chris Clack

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Reid, A. (1999). Putting the Spine Back in the Spineless Tagless G-Machine: An Implementation of Resumable Black-Holes. In: Hammond, K., Davie, T., Clack, C. (eds) Implementation of Functional Languages. IFL 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1595. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48515-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48515-5_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66229-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48515-5

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