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FS-1098-inline-if-lambda.md

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F# RFC FS-1098 - inline-if-lambda attributes on parameters

The design suggestion "Inline if lambda attributes on parameters" is approved in principle. This RFC covers the detailed proposal for this suggestion.

Summary

We add an attribute InlineIfLambdaAttribute to use on parameters of inlined functions and methods, indicating to the compiler that, if a lambda is supplied as a parameter, it should be inlined.

Motivation

High-performance code is often easiest achieved by inlining and reducing library code using standard F# code optimizations. However, when lambdas are passed as parameters they are often not inlined because the compiler deems them too large. This causes closure allocations.

This problem is particularly chronic for F# computation expression builders which compute functions and pass them as functions.

This problem is particularly motivated by the fact that RFC FS-1087 proposes to perform more aggressive inlining for resumable code by default. This raises the likelihood (a.k.a. certainty) that people would start to use resumable code to achieve higher performance for synchronous code, which would be a tragedy of epic proportions, resulting in an endless sea of unreadable and unmaintainable high performance code.

Examples

let map ([<InlineIfLambda>] f: int -> int) xs  =
    ....

Detailed design

We add InlineIfLambdaAttribute to use on parameters of inlined functions and methods, indicating to the compiler that, if a lambda is supplied as a parameter, it should be inlined.

The attribute is indicative only and may be ignored by the F# compiler.

The attribute need only be present in an implementation file, as it forms part of the logic of the inlined annotation. It is optional in a signature. If used in the signature it must be present in the implementation.

Drawbacks

None

Alternatives

Use the inline keyword

One design option is to use the inline keyword at parameter position. However this is misleading.

  1. inline in F# has semantic meaning, allowing further generalization to take place.

  2. The inline doesn't always apply even in statically compiled code.

  3. There are some small potential compatibility issues to consider if we allowed inline on parameter position

    let map (inline (f: int -> int)) xs  = ....

    Here "inline" is outside the part of the pattern syntax that is about type annotations. Is this allowed or not? If inline is "outside" the pattern syntax then it makes sense. However it's probably not what we want, preferring

    let map (inline f: int -> int) xs  = ....

    where the "inline" associates with the "f".

    Currently in the parse, inline comes before mutable (though they are later determined to be mutually incompatible. For mutable, we allow

    let mutable (a, b) = (1, 2)

    which makes both a and b mutable. So mutable associates outside the pattern, not with each identifier.

Putting these together an attribute seems more appropriate, as this is much more like the AggressiveInliningAttribute of .NET, rather than a semantic part of the F# language.

Use on non-lambda values

Potentially this could be used on non-lambda arguments, requesting that the value be duplicated and copied if optimization information is known for it, and this optimization information is never trimmed. For example, on values of union type.

Automatically infer from single use

We could automatically infer the InlineIfLambda status if a function parameter is only applied at one point in the code.

There is no really good reason not to do this, except it feels like it is useful to be able to be explicit about the intent here.

Example: low-allocation list and array builders

See the collector examples in list.fs and array.fs and compares them to examples using the resumable code mechanism. The collector examples rely on InlineIfLambda and the optimizations described in Tooling RFC FST-1034

The sample defines listc { .. }, arrayc { .. } for collections. The overall result is a list builder that runs up to 5x faster than the built-in [ .. ] for generated lists of computationally varying shape (i.e. [ .. ] that use conditionals, yield and so on).

F#'s existing [ .. ] and [| ... |] and seq { .. } |> Seq.toResizeArray all use an intermediate IEnumerable which is then iterated to populate a ResizeArray and then converted to the final immutable collection. In contrast, generating directly into a ResizeArray is potentially more efficient (and for list { ... } further perf improvements are possible if we put this in FSharp.Core and use the mutate-tail-cons-cell trick to generate the list directly). This technique has been known for a while and can give faster collection generation but it has not been possible to get good code generation for the expressions in many cases. Note that, these aren't really "state machines" because there are no resumption points - there is just an implicit collection we are yielding into in otherwise synchronous code.

Compatibility

This is a backward compatible addition.

Unresolved questions

  • Do we use this through FSharp.Core where existing inline functions take function parameters? Answer: Yes, we will, however in a separate PR and not directly part of RFC
  • Is a warning or error given if used on a parameter of non-inline functions? Answer: Yes, we will emit an error.