As a beginner, I had found the behaviour quite unpredictable. But with time I found that I could reason out the behaviour with my slowly growing knowledge of laziness. I don't spot all the places in my program that will suck while writing a program, but post facto many things become clear. (And then there is the profiler!)
GHC's internal details had been never necessary to me! I aspire to write computationally heavy programs in haskell in future, and I have been successful in reaching factors of 3 to 5 with C programs (though I have not been upto factors of 1 for which I find claims here and there) without any knowledge of GHC internals. But the GHC user guide is immensely valuable. I would like to note that beginners' codes are many times time/memory consuming even in slighly complicated cases, and it may be a big source of frustration and turn-away if they don't stick up and pursue. This is not a problem of GHC, or even Haskell; it generally applies to functional programming. These are my opinions; I am only an advanced beginner :) 2008/5/10 Jeff Polakow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Hello, > > One frequent criticism of Haskell (and by extension GHC) is that it has > unpredictable performance and memory consumption. I personally do not find > this to be the case. I suspect that most programmer confusion is rooted in > shaky knowledge of lazy evaluation; and I have been able to fix, with > relative ease, the various performance problems I've run into. However I am > not doing any sort of performance critical computing (I care about minutes > or seconds, but not about milliseconds). > > I would like to know what others think about this. Is GHC predictable? Is a > thorough knowledge of lazy evaluation good enough to write efficient > (whatever that means to you) code? Or is intimate knowledge of GHC's innards > necessary? > > thanks, > Jeff > > PS I am conflating Haskell and GHC because I use GHC (with its extensions) > and it produces (to my knowledge) the fastest code. > > --- > > This e-mail may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you > are not the intended recipient (or have received this e-mail in error) > please notify the sender immediately and destroy this e-mail. Any > unauthorized copying, disclosure or distribution of the material in this > e-mail is strictly forbidden. > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > >
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