Visualizing lazy evaluation

Haskell and other call-by-need languages use lazy evaluation as their default evaluation strategy. For beginners and advanced programmers alike this can sometimes be confusing. We therefore developed a tool called visualize-cbn. It is a simple interpreter for a mini Haskell-like language which outputs the state of the program at every step in a human readable format. It can also generate a HTML/JavaScript version with “Previous” and “Next” buttons to step through a program. We released the tool as open source to github and Hackage, in the hope that it will be useful to others. In this blog post we will illustrate how one might take advantage of this tool. We will revisit the infamous triple of functions foldr, foldl, foldl', and show how they behave. As a slightly more advanced example, we will also study the memory behaviour of mapM in the Maybe monad. Hopefully, this show-rather-than-tell blog post might help some people understand these functions better.

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