Performance on amd64

[John Skaller]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 17:08 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:

> > Thanks, downloading it now.. will try. What exactly is
> > a 'registered' build?
> 
> An "unregisterised" build generates plain C which is compiled with a C
> compiler.  The term "registerised" refers to a set of optimisations
> which require post-processing the assembly generated by the C compiler
> using a Perl script (affectionately known as the Evil Mangler).  In
> particular, registerised code does real tail-calls and uses real machine
> registers to store the Hsakell stack and heap pointers.  

Ah! So 'register' refers to machine registers .. not
some certification by some kind of authority, which is
what I guessed .. ?

> Sure, it's good to look at these small benchmarks to improve aspects of
> our compilers, but we should never claim that results on microbenchmarks
> are in any way an indicator of performance on programs that people
> actually write.

One can also argue that 'programmer performance' is important,
not just machine performance.

> The shootout has lots of good benchmarks, for sure.  

I'm not so sure ;(

> Don't restrict
> yourself to the small programs, though.

Of course, larger more complex programs may give interesting
performance results, but have one significant drawback:
a lot more work is required to write them.

> It's still hard to get a big picture from the results - there are too
> many variables. I believe many of the Haskell programs in the suite can
> go several times faster with the right tweaks, and using the right
> libraries (such as a decent PackedString library).

Maybe I'm asking the wrong question. Can you think of a computation
which you believe Haskell would be the best at?

.. and while you're at it: a computation GHC does
NOT handle well -- IMHO these are actually most useful
to compiler writers.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>
Download Felix: http://felix.sf.net
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