[Haskell-cafe] #haskell works

[Tim Chevalier]

On 12/14/07, Dan Piponi <dpiponi at gmail.com> wrote:
> There have been some great improvements in array handling recently. I
> decided to have a look at the assembly language generated by some
> simple array manipulation code and understand why C is at least twice
> as fast as ghc 6.8.1. One the one hand it was disappointing to see
> that the Haskell register allocator seems a bit inept and was loading
> data into registers that should never have been spilled out of
> registers in the first place.

Someone who knows the backend better than I do can correct me if I'm
wrong, but it's my understanding that GHC 6.8.1 doesn't even attempt
to do any register allocation on x86. So -- register allocator? What
register allocator? But this is being actively worked on; I understand
there's code for it in the HEAD.

> On the other hand, the code wasn't
> fundamentally doing anything weird (eg. it wasn't doing graph
> reductions or anything like that, it looked like the sort of loop you
> might get from a C compiler). It was a few seconds of fairly mindless
> work to fix up the assembly language and make it much faster. And if I
> can do it, it means that the next generation of Haskell compiler
> should be able to do it too, after all, good freely available methods
> to allocate registers do exist. So I'm looking forward to the next
> version of GHC matching C's performance for inner loops of array
> manipulation code :-)

It sounds like Team GHC is thinking about the exact same things you are here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/Nov07

Cheers,
Tim

-- 
Tim Chevalier * catamorphism.org * Often in error, never in doubt
"Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." --Ursula K. Le Guin