Fwd: Is anything being done to remedy the soul crushing compile times of GHC?

[Thomas Tuegel]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 2:58 AM, Ben Gamari <ben at smart-cactus.org> wrote:
> Yes, it would be great if someone could step up to look at Cabal's
> performance. Running `cabal build` on an up-to-date tree of a
> moderately-sized (10 kLoC, 8 components, 60 modules) Haskell project I
> have laying around takes over 5 seconds from start-to-finish.
>
> `cabal build`ing just a single executable component takes 4 seconds.
> This same executable takes 48 seconds for GHC to build from scratch with
> optimization and 12 seconds without.

I have contributed several performance patches to Cabal in the past,
so I feel somewhat qualified to speak here. The remaining slowness in
`cabal build` is mostly due to the pre-process phase. There work in
progress which may improve this situation. We could also look at
separating the pre-process phase from the build phase. (It seems odd
to call it `pre-process` when it is *always* run during the build
phase, doesn't it?) This has the advantage of sidestepping the
slowness issue entirely, but it may break some users' workflows. Is
that trade-off worth it? We could use user feedback here.

Regards,
Tom