Tail Modulo Cons
Résumé
OCaml function calls consume space on the system stack. Operating
systems set default limits on the stack space which are much lower
than the available memory. If a program runs out of stack space,
they get the dreaded "Stack Overflow" exception -- they crash. As
a result, OCaml programmers have to be careful, when they write
recursive functions, to remain in the so-called
_tail-recursive_ fragment, using _tail_ calls that do not
consume stack space.
This discipline is a source of difficulties for both beginners and
experts. Beginners have to be taught recursion, and then
tail-recursion. Experts disagree on the "right" way to write
`List.map`. The direct version is beautiful but not
tail-recursive, so it crashes on larger inputs. The naive
tail-recursive transformation is (slightly) slower than the direct
version, and experts may want to avoid that cost. Some libraries
propose horrible implementations, unrolling code by hand, to
compensate for this performance loss. In general, tail-recursion
requires the programmer to manually perform sophisticated program
transformations.
In this work we propose an implementation of "Tail Modulo Cons"
(TMC) for OCaml. TMC is a program transformation for a fragment of
non-tail-recursive functions, that rewrites them in
_destination-passing style_. The supported fragment is smaller
than other approaches such as continuation-passing-style, but the
performance of the transformed code is on par with the direct,
non-tail-recursive version. Many useful functions that traverse
a recursive datastructure and rebuild another recursive structure
are in the TMC fragment, in particular `List.map`
(and `List.filter`, `List.append`, etc.). Finally those functions
can be written in a way that is beautiful, correct on all inputs,
and efficient.
In this work we give a novel modular, compositional definition of
the TMC transformation. We discuss the design space of
user-interface choices: what degree of control for the user, when to
warn or fail when the transformation may lead unexpected results. We
mention a few remaining design difficulties, and present
(in appendices) a performance evaluation of the transformed code.
Domaines
Langage de programmation [cs.PL]Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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