Greg In GHC, big cases are done as tables (if dense) or trees (if sparse). If you have some examples where things go bad, do submit a bug report.
For big dispatches on strings, I'm pretty sure we do something linear, top to bottom. I'd be strongly inclined to use a proper Map structure if you want good performance on that. Is there some reason you don't want to? Simon From: glasgow-haskell-users-boun...@haskell.org [mailto:glasgow-haskell-users-boun...@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Greg Weber Sent: 09 October 2011 17:39 To: GHC users Subject: log time instead of linear for case matching We have a couple use cases in Yesod that can potentially match many different patterns. Routing connects the url of an http request to a Haskell function. The current code just uses a pattern match, which scales linearly. So if a site has a hundred different routes (urls), it could take 100 comparisons to finally match the url to a function. Michael Snoyman is writing some code to make this issue obsolete. One of the things it does is use a Map lookup instead of a case match. More worrying is our system for internationalization of a website. A user is supposed to make a sum type with every custom message as a constructor in that sum type. data Msg = Model | Year | Please -- Rendering function for English. renderEnglish Model = "Model" renderEnglish Year = "Year" renderEnglish Please = "Please fill in your car's details" -- Rendering function for Swedish. renderSwedish Model = "Modell" renderSwedish Year = "Årgång" renderSwedish Please = "Vänligen fyll i uppgifterna för din bil" So if there are 100 custom messages on a site, that will setup a case match with potentially 100 comparisons. Note that we are using this technique for type safety- switching to a map here would be difficult. We want to know at compile time that a translation exists for every message. So first of all I am wondering if a sum type comparison does in fact scale linearly or if there are optimizations in place to make the lookup constant or logarithmic. Second, I as wondering (for the routing case) if Haskell can make a string case comparison logarithmic so that users can use case comparisons instead of maps for string collections that are known at compile time and won't change.
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