Is there a way to avoid copying the whole search path of a binary tree on insert? - haskell

Question

I've just started working my way through Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures, but have been doing things in Haskell rather than Standard ML. However, I've come across an early exercise (2.5) that's left me a bit stumped on how to do things in Haskell:
Inserting an existing element into a binary search tree copies the entire search path
even though the copied nodes are indistinguishable from the originals. Rewrite insert using exceptions to avoid this copying. Establish only one handler per insertion rather than one handler per iteration.
Now, my understanding is that ML, being an impure language, gets by with a conventional approach to exception handling not so different to, say, Java's, so you can accomplish it something like this:
type Tree = E | T of Tree * int * Tree
exception ElementPresent
fun insert (x, t) =
let fun go E = T (E, x, E)
fun go T(l, y, r) =
if x < y then T(go (l), x, r)
else if y < x then T(l, x, go (r))
else raise ElementPresent
in go t
end
handle ElementPresent => t
I don't have an ML implementation, so this may not be quite right in terms of the syntax.
My issue is that I have no idea how this can be done in Haskell, outside of doing everything in the IO monad, which seems like cheating and even if it's not cheating, would seriously limit the usefulness of a function which really doesn't do any mutation. I could use the Maybe monad:
data Tree a = Empty | Fork (Tree a) a (Tree a)
deriving (Show)
insert :: (Ord a) => a -> Tree a -> Tree a
insert x t = maybe t id (go t)
where go Empty = return (Fork Empty x Empty)
go (Fork l y r)
| x < y = do l' <- go l; return (Fork l' y r)
| x > y = do r' <- go r; return (Fork l y r')
| otherwise = Nothing
This means everything winds up wrapped in Just on the way back up when the element isn't found, which requires more heap allocation, and sort of defeats the purpose. Is this allocation just the price of purity?
EDIT to add: A lot of why I'm wondering about the suitability of the Maybe solution is that the optimization described only seems to save you all the constructor calls you would need in the case where the element already exists, which means heap allocations proportional to the length of the search path. The Maybe also avoids those constructor calls when the element already exists, but then you get a number of Just constructor calls equal to the length of the search path. I understand that a sufficiently smart compiler could elide all the Just allocations, but I don't know if, say, the current version of GHC is really that smart.

Answer 1

In terms of cost, the ML version is actually very similar to your Haskell version.
Every recursive call in the ML version results in a stack frame. The same is true in the
Haskell version. This is going to be proportional in size to the path that you traverse in
the tree. Also, both versions will of course allocate new nodes for the entire path if an insertion is actually performed.
In your Haskell version, every recursive call might also eventually result in the
allocation of a Just node. This will go on the minor heap, which is just a block of
memory with a bump pointer. For all practical purposes, GHC's minor heap is roughly equivalent in
cost to the stack. Since these are short-lived allocations, they won't normally end up
being moved to the major heap at all.

Answer 2

GHC generally cannot elide path copying in cases like that. However, there is a way to do it manually, without incurring any of the indirection/allocation costs of Maybe. Here it is:
{-# LANGUAGE MagicHash #-}
import GHC.Prim (reallyUnsafePtrEquality#)
data Tree a = Empty | Fork (Tree a) a (Tree a)
deriving (Show)
insert :: (Ord a) => a -> Tree a -> Tree a
insert x Empty = Fork Empty x Empty
insert x node#(Fork l y r)
| x < y = let l' = insert x l in
case reallyUnsafePtrEquality# l l' of
1# -> node
_ -> Fork l' y r
| x > y = let r' = insert x r in
case reallyUnsafePtrEquality# r r' of
1# -> node
_ -> Fork l y r'
| otherwise = node
The pointer equality function does exactly what's in the name. Here it is safe because even if the equality returns a false negative we only do a bit of extra copying, and nothing worse happens.
It's not the most idiomatic or prettiest Haskell, but the performance benefits can be significant. In fact, this trick is used very frequently in unordered-containers.

Answer 3

As fizruk indicates, the Maybe approach is not significantly different from what you'd get in Standard ML. Yes, the whole path is copied, but the new copy is discarded if it turns out not to be needed. The Just constructor itself may not even be allocated on the heap—it can't escape from insert, let alone the module, and you don't do anything weird with it, so the compiler is free to analyze it to death.
Edit
There are efficiency problems, now that I think of it. Your use of Maybe conceals the fact that you're actually making two passes—one down to find the insertion point and one up to build the tree. The solution to this is to drop Maybe Tree in favor of (Tree,Bool) and use strictness annotations, or to switch to continuation-passing style. Also, if you choose to stay with the three-way logic, you may want to use the three-way comparison function. Alternatively, you can go all the way to the bottom each time and check later if you hit a duplicate.

Answer 4

If you have a predicate that checks whether the key is already in the tree, you can look before you leap:
insert x t = if contains t x then t else insert' x t
This traverses the tree twice, of course. Whether that's as bad as it sounds should be determined empirically: it might just load the relevant part of the tree into the cache.