Lambda the Ultimate

[ICFP Submission - Referees skip this]
Stream Fusion: From Lists to Streams to Nothing at All applies the fusion system from Rewriting Haskell Strings to ordinary lists. The result is more comprehensive than earlier systems like foldr/build.

This paper presents an automatic fusion system, stream fusion, based on equational transformations, that fuses a wider range of functions than existing short-cut fusion systems. In particular, stream fusion is able to fuse zips, left folds and functions over nested lists, including list comprehensions. A distinguishing feature of the stream fusion framework is its simplicity: by transforming list functions to expose their structure, intermediate values are eliminated by general purpose compiler optimisations.

We have reimplemented the entire Haskell standard list library on top of our framework, providing stream fusion for Haskell lists. By allowing a wider range of functions to fuse, we see an increase in the number of occurrences of fusion in typical Haskell programs. We present benchmarks documenting time and space improvements.

Darius Bacon suggests the SERIES package for common lisp may be related.