What are super combinators and constant applicative forms?

Question

I'm struggling with what Super Combinators are:

A supercombinator is either a constant, or a combinator which contains only supercombinators as subexpressions.

And also with what Constant Applicative Forms are:

Any super combinator which is not a lambda abstraction. This includes truly constant expressions such as 12, ((+) 1 2), [1,2,3] as well as partially applied functions such as ((+) 4). Note that this last example is equivalent under eta abstraction to \ x -> (+) 4 x which is not a CAF.

This is just not making any sense to me! Isn't ((+) 4) just as "truly constant" as 12? CAFs sound like values to my simple mind.

Answer 1

These Haskell wiki pages you reference are old, and I think unfortunately written. Particularly unfortunate is that they mix up CAFs and supercombinators. Supercombinators are interesting but unrelated to GHC. CAFs are still very much a part of GHC, and can be understood without reference to supercombinators.

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So let's start with supercombinators. Combinators derive from combinatory logic, and, in the usage here, consist of functions which only apply the values passed in to one another in one or another form -- i.e. they combine their arguments. The most famous set of combinators are S, K, and I, which taken together are Turing-complete. Supercombinators, in this context, are functions built only of values passed in, combinators, and other supercombinators. Hence any supercombinator can be expanded, through substitution, into a plain old combinator.

Some compilers for functional languages (not GHC!) use combinators and supercombinators as intermediate steps in compilation. As with any similar compiler technology, the reason for doing this is to admit optimization analysis that is more easily performed in such a simplified, minimal language. One such core language built on supercombinators is Edwin Brady's epic.

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Constant Applicative Forms are something else entirely. They're a bit more subtle, and have a few gotchas. The way to think of them is as an aspect of compiler implementation with no separate semantic meaning but with a potentially profound effect on runtime performance. The following may not be a perfect description of a CAF, but it'll try to convey my intuition of what one is, since I haven't seen a really good description anywhere else for me to crib from. The clean "authoritative" description in the GHC Commentary Wiki reads as follows:

Constant Applicative Forms, or CAFs for short, are top-level values defined in a program. Essentially, they are objects that are not allocated dynamically at run-time but, instead, are part of the static data of the program.

That's a good start. Pure, functional, lazy languages can be thought of in some sense as a graph reduction machine. The first time you demand the value of a node, that forces its evaluation, which in turn can demand the values of subnodes, etc. One a node is evaluated, the resultant value sticks around (although it does not have to stick around -- since this is a pure language we could always keep the subnodes live and recalculate with no semantic effect). A CAF is indeed just a value. But, in the context, a special kind of value -- one which the compiler can determine has a meaning entirely dependent on its subnodes. That is to say:

foo x = ...   where thisIsACaf = [1..10::Int]          thisIsNotACaf = [1..x::Int]         thisIsAlsoNotACaf :: Num a => [a]         thisIsAlsoNotACaf = [1..10] -- oops, polymorphic! the "num" dictionary is implicitly a parameter.          thisCouldBeACaf = const [1..10::Int] x -- requires a sufficiently smart compiler         thisAlsoCouldBeACaf _ = [1..10::Int] -- also requires a sufficiently smart compiler 

So why do we care if things are CAFs? Basically because sometimes we really really don't want to recompute something (for example, a memotable!) and so want to make sure it is shared properly. Other times we really do want to recompute something (e.g. a huge boring easy to generate list -- such as the naturals -- which we're just walking over) and not have it stick around in memory forever. A combination of naming things and binding them under lets or writing them inline, etc. typically lets us specify these sorts of things in a natural, intuitive way. Occasionally, however, the compiler is smarter or dumber than we expect, and something we think should only be computed once is always recomputed, or something we don't want to hang on to gets lifted out as a CAF. Then, we need to think things through more carefully. See this discussion to get an idea about some of the trickiness involved: A good way to avoid "sharing"?

[By the way, I don't feel up to it, but anyone that wants to should feel free to take as much of this answer as they want to try and integrate it with the existing Haskell Wiki pages and improve/update them]