Proposal: Add a benchmark section to .cabal files

[Tillmann Rendel]

Hi,

Johan Tibell wrote:
> [...] I'm convinced we need support for building benchmark using Cabal.  [...]

Could test sections be used for benchmarks, too?

> Step 1. Add basic support for building simple benchmark suites e.g. modelled
> after test suite sections:

This should work immediately.

> Step 2. Add a detailed benchmark interface that allows the benchmark to
> associate a real valued *measure* (optionally with upper and lower bounds)
> with a benchmark name.

This could be supported by a protocol where a "test" reports a real 
instead of a boolean value.

   Test bench-foo
       type:           benchmark-1.0
       main-is:        bench-foo.hs
       build-depends:  base

Except for the more specialized keywords, there seems to be no need to 
distinguish tests from benchmarks.

   Tillmann