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authorEelco Dolstra <e.dolstra@tudelft.nl>2004-03-30 15:05:35 +0000
committerEelco Dolstra <e.dolstra@tudelft.nl>2004-03-30 15:05:35 +0000
commitc4ac2a164af1c4198852844ae4fcfb99c7e8c110 (patch)
treeec6354d55f2bcb793756b1dd29d30d8c3a209d95 /ChangeLog
parentdf101d6fca1d60d4159056e87dd1b3d6c2855661 (diff)
* The recent change in nixpkgs of calling `stdenv.mkDerivation'
instead of `derivation' triggered a huge slowdown in the Nix expression evaluator. Total execution time of `nix-env -qa' went up by a factor of 60 or so. This scalability problem was caused by expressions such as (x: y: ... x ...) a b where `a' is a large term (say, the one in `all-packages-generic.nix'). Then the first beta-reduction would produce (y: ... a ...) b by substituting `a' for `x'. The second beta-reduction would then substitute `b' for `y' into the body `... a ...', which is a large term due to `a', and thus causes a large traversal to be performed by substitute() in the second reduction. This is however entirely redundant, since `a' cannot contain free variables (since we never substitute below a weak head normal form). The solution is to wrap substituted terms into a `Closed' constructor, i.e., subst(subs, Var(x)) = Closed(e) iff subs[x] = e have substitution not descent into closed terms, subst(subs, Closed(x)) = Closed(x) and otherwise ignore them for evaluation, eval(Closed(x)) = eval(x). * Fix a typo that caused incorrect substitutions to be performed in simple lambdas, e.g., `(x: x: x) a' would reduce to `(x: a)'.
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