[Haskell-cafe] Re: OCaml list sees abysmal Language Shootoutresults

[Simon Marlow]

On 07 October 2004 18:23, Ketil Malde wrote:

> Couldn't readFile et al. provide the standard interface, but use
> hGetBuf tricks (e.g. from your 'wc' entry) behind the curtains?

readFile does do buffering behind the scenes, that's not the problem.
The problem is doing the computation on a [Char] instead of a raw buffer
of bytes.

There are various known techniques that could be used to speed up GHC's
implementation of lists, none of which we've ever tried.  This might be
a good area for experimentation, if anyone's looking for something to do
in GHC.

Cheers,
	Simon