devel/hs-strict 0.5.1nb3 NetBSD

This package provides strict versions of some standard Haskell data types (pairs, Maybe and Either). It also contains strict IO operations.

It is common knowledge that lazy datastructures can lead to space-leaks. This problem is particularly prominent, when using lazy datastructures to store the state of a long-running application in memory. One common solution to this problem is to use seq and its variants in every piece of code that updates your state. However a much easier solution is to use fully strict types to store such state values. By "fully strict types" we mean types for whose values it holds that, if they are in weak-head normal form, then they are also in normal form. Intuitively, this means that values of fully strict types cannot contain unevaluated thunks.