Pointer Tagging

  
This patch implements pointer tagging as per our ICFP'07 paper "Faster
laziness using dynamic pointer tagging".  It improves performance by
10-15% for most workloads, including GHC itself.

The original patches were by Alexey Rodriguez Yakushev
<mrchebas@gmail.com>, with additions and improvements by me.  I've
re-recorded the development as a single patch.

The basic idea is this: we use the low 2 bits of a pointer to a heap
object (3 bits on a 64-bit architecture) to encode some information
about the object pointed to.  For a constructor, we encode the "tag"
of the constructor (e.g. True vs. False), for a function closure its
arity.  This enables some decisions to be made without dereferencing
the pointer, which speeds up some common operations.  In particular it
enables us to avoid costly indirect jumps in many cases.

More information in the commentary:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Rts/HaskellExecution/PointerTagging

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/rts/Sparks.c b/rts/Sparks.c
index ca60e1338c..0ff4ee4cce 100644
--- a/rts/Sparks.c
+++ b/rts/Sparks.c
@@ -200,6 +200,12 @@ newSpark (StgRegTable *reg, StgClosure *p)
 {
     StgSparkPool *pool = &(reg->rSparks);
 
+    /* I am not sure whether this is the right thing to do.
+     * Maybe it is better to exploit the tag information
+     * instead of throwing it away?
+     */
+    p = UNTAG_CLOSURE(p);
+
     ASSERT_SPARK_POOL_INVARIANTS(pool);
 
     if (closure_SHOULD_SPARK(p)) {