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Last Saturday I have held a talk at the Meta Main-Rhein Chaosdays 2012 in Darmstadt, an event of the local Chaos Computer Club groups and not unsimilar to Karlsruhe’s yearly GPN. I was asked to give an talk on a advanced, Haskell related topic, so I took my audience on a guided tour through the memory of a running Haskell program, explained the different types of closures and their layout, and showed how info tables are used to allow the garbage collector to uniformly treat the objects. We also used that knowledge to roughly predict the memory footprint of a program processing a large file using the String data type.

Besides showing raw bytes (using my ghc-heap-view package and a small utility function) I included two visualizations: One is the video of a copying garbage collector at work that I blogged about last week, and the other is a nice tool that a student of mine creates for his bachelor thesis: It allows you to visualize the heap structure of a (potentially partially evaluated) value from GHCi and interactively evaluate parts of the structure – if you want, even thunks that are “hidden” behind other thunks, something that you cannot do from Haskell code. The following picture is a screen shot of ghc-vis visualizing the evaluation of the famous two-line primes definition:

The slides of my talk do not cover everything that was included, but the transcript does. It is in German, so as before, if you want me to translate it, then (convince your professor or employer to) invite me to hold the talk again. The ghc-vis tool can be found on Hackage, more information about it is on the author’s website.