Question

I am looking for a mutable (balanced) tree/map/hash table in Haskell or a way how to simulate it inside a function. I.e. when I call the same function several times, the structure is preserved. So far I have tried Data.HashTable (which is OK, but somewhat slow) and tried Data.Array.Judy but I was unable to make it work with GHC 6.10.4. Are there any other options?

Answer 1

If you want mutable state, you can have it. Just keep passing the updated map around, or keep it in a state monad (which turns out to be the same thing).

import qualified Data.Map as Map
import Control.Monad.ST
import Data.STRef
memoize :: Ord k => (k -> ST s a) -> ST s (k -> ST s a)
memoize f = do
    mc <- newSTRef Map.empty
    return $ \k -> do
        c <- readSTRef mc
        case Map.lookup k c of
            Just a -> return a
            Nothing -> do a <- f k
                          writeSTRef mc (Map.insert k a c) >> return a

You can use this like so. (In practice, you might want to add a way to clear items from the cache, too.)

import Control.Monad
main :: IO ()
main = do
    fib <- stToIO $ fixST $ \fib -> memoize $ \n ->
        if n < 2 then return n else liftM2 (+) (fib (n-1)) (fib (n-2))
    mapM_ (print <=< stToIO . fib) [1..10000]

At your own risk, you can unsafely escape from the requirement of threading state through everything that needs it.

import System.IO.Unsafe
unsafeMemoize :: Ord k => (k -> a) -> k -> a
unsafeMemoize f = unsafePerformIO $ do
    f' <- stToIO $ memoize $ return . f
    return $ unsafePerformIO . stToIO . f'

fib :: Integer -> Integer
fib = unsafeMemoize $ \n -> if n < 2 then n else fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)

main :: IO ()
main = mapM_ (print . fib) [1..1000]