+Note [SpecConstrAnnotation]
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+SpecConstrAnnotation is defined in GHC.Exts, and is only guaranteed to
+be available in stage 2 (well, until the bootstrap compiler can be
+guaranteed to have it)
+
+So we define it to be () in stage1 (ie when GHCI is undefined), and
+'#ifdef' out the code that uses it.
+
+See also Note [Forcing specialisation]
+
+Note [Forcing specialisation]
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+With stream fusion and in other similar cases, we want to fully specialise
+some (but not necessarily all!) loops regardless of their size and the
+number of specialisations. We allow a library to specify this by annotating
+a type with ForceSpecConstr and then adding a parameter of that type to the
+loop. Here is a (simplified) example from the vector library:
+
+ data SPEC = SPEC | SPEC2
+ {-# ANN type SPEC ForceSpecConstr #-}
+
+ foldl :: (a -> b -> a) -> a -> Stream b -> a
+ {-# INLINE foldl #-}
+ foldl f z (Stream step s _) = foldl_loop SPEC z s
+ where
+ foldl_loop !sPEC z s = case step s of
+ Yield x s' -> foldl_loop sPEC (f z x) s'
+ Skip -> foldl_loop sPEC z s'
+ Done -> z
+
+SpecConstr will spot the SPEC parameter and always fully specialise
+foldl_loop. Note that
+
+ * We have to prevent the SPEC argument from being removed by
+ w/w which is why (a) SPEC is a sum type, and (b) we have to seq on
+ the SPEC argument.
+
+ * And lastly, the SPEC argument is ultimately eliminated by
+ SpecConstr itself so there is no runtime overhead.
+
+This is all quite ugly; we ought to come up with a better design.
+
+ForceSpecConstr arguments are spotted in scExpr' and scTopBinds which then set
+sc_force to True when calling specLoop. This flag does three things:
+ * Ignore specConstrThreshold, to specialise functions of arbitrary size
+ (see scTopBind)
+ * Ignore specConstrCount, to make arbitrary numbers of specialisations
+ (see specialise)
+ * Specialise even for arguments that are not scrutinised in the loop
+ (see argToPat; Trac #4488)
+
+What alternatives did I consider? Annotating the loop itself doesn't
+work because (a) it is local and (b) it will be w/w'ed and I having
+w/w propagating annotation somehow doesn't seem like a good idea. The
+types of the loop arguments really seem to be the most persistent
+thing.
+
+Annotating the types that make up the loop state doesn't work,
+either, because (a) it would prevent us from using types like Either
+or tuples here, (b) we don't want to restrict the set of types that
+can be used in Stream states and (c) some types are fixed by the user
+(e.g., the accumulator here) but we still want to specialise as much
+as possible.
+
+ForceSpecConstr is done by way of an annotation:
+ data SPEC = SPEC | SPEC2
+ {-# ANN type SPEC ForceSpecConstr #-}
+But SPEC is the *only* type so annotated, so it'd be better to
+use a particular library type.
+
+Alternatives to ForceSpecConstr
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+Instead of giving the loop an extra argument of type SPEC, we
+also considered *wrapping* arguments in SPEC, thus
+ data SPEC a = SPEC a | SPEC2
+
+ loop = \arg -> case arg of
+ SPEC state ->
+ case state of (x,y) -> ... loop (SPEC (x',y')) ...
+ S2 -> error ...
+The idea is that a SPEC argument says "specialise this argument
+regardless of whether the function case-analyses it. But this
+doesn't work well:
+ * SPEC must still be a sum type, else the strictness analyser
+ eliminates it
+ * But that means that 'loop' won't be strict in its real payload
+This loss of strictness in turn screws up specialisation, because
+we may end up with calls like
+ loop (SPEC (case z of (p,q) -> (q,p)))
+Without the SPEC, if 'loop' was strict, the case would move out
+and we'd see loop applied to a pair. But if 'loop' isn' strict
+this doesn't look like a specialisable call.
+
+Note [NoSpecConstr]
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+The ignoreAltCon stuff allows you to say
+ {-# ANN type T NoSpecConstr #-}
+to mean "don't specialise on arguments of this type. It was added
+before we had ForceSpecConstr. Lacking ForceSpecConstr we specialised
+regardless of size; and then we needed a way to turn that *off*. Now
+that we have ForceSpecConstr, this NoSpecConstr is probably redundant.
+(Used only for PArray.)
+
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