Int vs Word performance?

[Don Stewart]

claus.reinke:
>>> Here is a trivial example with drastic difference between
>>> T = Int and T = Word (~2.5x here):
>>>
>>>    main = print $ foldl' (+) 0 [1..100000000::T]
> ..
>>>    GHC.Prim.word2Int#
>>>        (GHC.Prim.and#
>>>            (GHC.Prim.int2Word# wild13_XbE)
>>>            (GHC.Prim.int2Word# y#_a4EZ))
>>>
>>> Is that likely to cost me a lot or are these conversions cheap?
>>
>> Those guys are no-ops, and in general you should never see a performance
>> difference. If you do, it is a bug!  There are some known cases where
>> rules are missing however:
>
> Thanks, that is one thing less to worry about. Btw, is there a "guide to
> reading Core" somewhere, with emphasis on performance aspects (what
> to look for when optimizing time or space usage, what to ignore, how to
> make it more readable, etc)?
>
> Until I stumbled over CORE annotations, I found it near impossible even
> to find the pieces of interest for non-trivial programs, things like
> -dsuppress-uniques help a little with diffs, some things look big but
> are noops, etc. - that kind of helpful pragmatic knowledge (why does
> it look as if source variable names aren't always preserved; why does
> it use random uniques instead of de Bruijn-style disambiguation, which
> wouldn't interfere with diffs and would have static semantic content;
> why do the outputs look different for core2core vs dump-simpl, ..).

I use the ghc-core tool:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/ghc-core