The Spineless Tagless G-machine is an abstract machine designed to support nonstrict higher-order functional languages. This presentation of the machine falls into three parts. Firstly, we give a general discussion of the design issues involved in implementing non-strict functional languages. Next, we present the STG language, an austere but recognisably-functional language, which as well as a denotational meaning has a well-defined operational semantics. The STG language is the "abstract machine code" for the Spineless Tagless G-machine. Lastly, we discuss the mapping of the STG language onto stock hardware. The success of an abstract machine model depends largely on how efficient this mapping can be made, though this topic is often relegated to a short section. Instead, we give a detailed discussion of the design issues and the choices we have made. Our principal target is the C language, treating the C compiler as a portable assembler. Version 2.5 of this paper (minus appendix) appe...

Profiling tools, which measure and display the dynamic space and time behaviour of programs, are essential for identifying execution bottlenecks. A variety of such tools exist for conventional languages, but almost none for non-strict functional languages. There is a good reason for this: lazy evaluation means that the program is executed in an order which is not immediately apparent from the source code, so it is difficult to relate dynamically-gathered statistics back to the original source. We present a new technique which solves this problem. The framework is general enough to profile both space and time behaviour. Better still, it is cheap to implement, and we describe how to do so in the context of the Spineless Tagless G-machine. 1 Introduction Many functional programs are quick and concise to express (Hughes [1989]) but often slow to run. Before being able to improve the efficiency of a program, a programmer has to be able to: 1. Identify the execution bottlenecks or "critical...

Some algorithms make critical internal use of updatable state, even though their external specification is purely functional. Based on earlier work on monads, we present a way of securely encapsulating stateful computations that manipulate multiple, named, mutable objects, in the context of a non-strict, purely-functional language. The security of the encapsulation is assured by the type system, using parametricity. The same framework is also used to handle input/output operations (state changes on the external world) and calls to C.