On 03/01/2012 16:54, Tristan Ravitch wrote:
This might be the expected behavior but I'll ask anyway. I have what
seems to be a legitimate stack overflow (due to excessive recursion
and not the evaluation of a big thunk). The stack trace from -xc only
shows about 13 calls on the stack (with each function that is called
only appearing once).
Is it by design that functions only appear once?
Yes, and this is the area where things might change. We have to somehow
make the stack finite, otherwise the data structure storing the stack
would fill up the memory. Here are a few options:
A) On a recursive call, truncate the stack to the previous instance
of the call
B) On a recursive call, do not push anything on the stack
C) On a recursive call, elide some previous entries in the stack
(e.g. replacing them with "...")
Currently we're doing a variant of A, which is good for profiling
because it means that the cost of a function call is always attributed
to a stack with that function at the top. However, A doesn't satisfy
all the properties we need, so certain compiler transformations aren't
valid. The only option that has the right properties is B, but that
isn't so useful for profiling.
C is more useful for stack traces, because there is more information
towards the top of the stack - the last few calls are correct, but
information deeper down the stack is lost. This is what Tristan Allwood
used in his "Finding the Needle" paper. Unfortunately C doesn't have
the right transformational properties either.
Cheers,
Simon
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