[Haskell-cafe] RE: ANNOUNCE: GHC survey results

[Simon Marlow]

On 28 June 2005 14:11, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:

> Tuesday, June 28, 2005, 1:58:13 PM, you wrote:
> 
>>   http://www.haskell.org/ghc/survey2005-summary.html
>> There's a lot to take in, but it's an interesting read.  Enjoy!
> 
> thank you all, processing all the 600 answers was not easy work :)
> 
> i have several comments regarding results of this survey:
> 
> 1) GHCi compiles to bytecode several times faster than GHC makes
> unoptimized compilation. can unoptimized GHC compilation just create
> bytecode (as Ocaml does)?

Do you really mean "several times faster"?  My impression is that it's a
few percent faster, if at all.  Some measurements would be good.  We've
thought about compiling to persistent byte code in the past, but the
gains never seemed to be worth the effort: we'd need a byte-code
serialiser and loader.

> 2) is your plans to support x86-64 platform includes Windows (and all
> other sorts of Unix), or it's for Linux only?

Definitely Windows too.  I hear the cygwin/mingw tools are still
unstable on Windows x64, though.

> 3) many users complaining about non-compatibility between GHC
> versions. if they mean library interfaces changes then how about using
> Pesco's library versioning scheme? (see
> http://www.haskell.org/tmrwiki/EternalCompatibilityInTheory) 

I've read that article, and I think it's an interesting idea.  I can't
disagree with the arguments put forward, but somehow, the cure seems a
bit painful.

Cheers,
	Simon