Understanding STG

Question

The design of GHC is based on something called STG, which stands for \"spineless, tagless G-machine\".

Now G-machine is apparently short for \"graph reduction machine\",

Answer 1

You are right about the "Spineless", that is it, if I'm correct. It is basically described on the 1988 article by Burn, Peyton-Jones and Robson, "The Spineless G-Machine". I've read it, but it is not so fresh in my mind. Basically, on the G-Machine, all stack entries point to an application node except the one on the top, which points to the head of the expression. Those application nodes make access to the arguments indirect, and in some G-Machine descriptions, before applying a function the stack is rearranged, so that the last n nodes on the stack are made to point to the argument instead of the application node. If I am not mistaken, the "Spineless" part is about avoiding having these application nodes (which are called the spine of the graph) on the stack altogether, thus avoiding that re-arrangement before each reduction.

As to the "Tagless" part, you are more correct now that you used to be, but... Using tags on nodes is a very, very old thing. Can you think on how a dynamically-typed language such as LISP was implemented? Every cell must have its value and a tag which says the type. If you want something you must examine the tag and act accordingly. In the case of Haskell, the evaluation state is more important than type, Haskell is statically typed.

In the STG machine, tags are not used. Tags were replaced, maybe through inspiration of OO lanaguages, by a set of function pointers. When you want the value of a node which has not been computed, the function will compute it. When it is already computed, the function returns it. This allows for a lot of creativity in what this function can do without making client code any more complex.

This "Tagless" part yes, is described in the "implementation of functional languages on stock hardware" article by SPJ.

There is also objection to this "tagless" thing. Basically, this involves function pointers, which is an indirect jump in computer architecture terms. And indirect jumps are an obstacle to branch prediction and hence to pipelining in general. Because either the architecture considers there is a data dependency on the jump argument, halting the pipeline, or the architecture assumes it does not know the destination and halts the pipeline.