[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk) writes:
> I have to care how fast my programs run. I like writing in Haskell
> very much, it's my favorite general-purpose language, but one of the
> biggest weak points of Haskell for me is poor efficiency (at least
> with ghc, I don't know how fast are other compilers). I wonder whether
> this is the issue of Haskell itself or the compilers, I wonder if I
> can expect things to go better in future.
I don't know what the future holds but, at least with GHC,
you already have a range of options, to try to go faster.
* You can profile your code and write better "standard"
Haskell;
* You can drop down to non-standard Haskell, and express
your code with (e.g.) unboxed values, bytePrimArray#s, --
i.e. direct access to the machinery that GHC's libraries
use;
* You can code selected hot spots in C/whatever, and call
out from Haskell to do those; if you do enough of this,
you end up with the non-Haskell program you would've had
to write anyway :-)
* You can give your code to the GHC people for benchmarking
purposes; be sure to mention, "By the way, this code runs
N times faster when compiled by HBC" -- it works wonders.
I think it is Very Cool that users have it within their
power to claw back arbitrary "performance loss", if they
want/need to.
Will
