David Barbour wrote:
Benjamin Redelings wrote:
My question is, roughly, is there already an existing framework for
incremental evaluation in Haskell?
Functional Reactive Programming can model this sort of 'change over
time' incremental computation, but I doubt you'd get a performance
benefit from it unless your operations are considerably more
expensive than '+' on numbers. Look into the 'Reactive' library, and
Conal Elliott's paper on it (Push-Pull FRP).
I'm currently developing a library for functional reactive
programming[1] and I've thought a bit about incremental evaluation and
FRP. Here my conclusions:
FRP is somewhat orthogonal to incremental computation because FRP is
focusing on expressiveness while incremental computation focuses on
performance. You can formulate some incremental algorithms in terms of
FRP, but you need special support from the implementation to make it
efficient. I do know that reactive-banana can handle some cases, but I
have my doubts whether Conal's Reactive library can (afaik, nobody has
tried to reason about its resource usage explicitly). Even then, events
and behaviors are "one abstraction level too low". In my opinion, you
are better off with a library/approach geared directly towards
incremental computations.
[1]: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Reactive-banana
Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus
--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com
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