GHC 6.8.1 is impressive!

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| I just finished a running Bluespec's regression suite on a version of
| our tools compiled with ghc 6.8.1. The results were impressive on two
| fronts:
|
| 1. All of our tests (almost 14,000) had the same behavior as with ghc 6.6.1
| 2. Our Haskell code was roughly 33% faster (relative to ghc 6.6.1). It
| seems that pointer-tagging made a big difference for our code base
| (since, if I'm reading the release notes correctly, constructor
| specialization isn't in yet).
|
| We just wanted to take a moment to say that we were pleasantly
| surprised by ghc 6.8.1

Thanks for taking the time to let us know Ravi.

Constructor specialisation (aka call-pattern specialisation) is in 6.8.1; try -O2 and see what difference that makes.  I'd be interested to know.

Simon