[Haskell-cafe] GHC optimisations

[Hugh Perkins]

On 8/21/07, Stefan O'Rear <stefanor at cox.net> wrote:
> Currently, it's never worse.  GHC's backend is about as good as GCC;
> most of the optimiations it doesn't do are not possible for GCC because
> of various lack-of-information problems (the stack pointer never aliases
> the heap pointer, stuff like that).  It's conceivable that at some point
> -fasm will be faster, because you have the possibility of much more
> accurate aliasing information inside the compiler, than can be coded in
> C.  In the meantime, note that the runtime difference is less than 3%
> and the compile time difference is over 100%, so it's only worthwhile if
> you expect *this version* of your program to be used more than 30 times,
> ie releases only.

Wait, you're saying that ghc can produce "pure" c-code, that doesnt
contain any assembly code, and that runs as fast as ghc code that does
contain assembly?

Sooo.... if I was feeling "evil", could I take this c-code and pipe it
into something that turns it into C#???   If it contains lots of
macros (or any macros at all perhaps...), this becomes non-trivial,
but otherwise I think most things in C can be mapped fairly trivially
to C#?  (It's a one-way mapping of course, eg "delete" in C is simply
dropped when mapped to c#).

(Not that I have any good reason to do this, simply... fun).