[Haskell-cafe] #haskell works

[Don Stewart]

andrewcoppin:
> Neil Mitchell wrote:
> >Hi
> >  
> >I agree with Bulat that Haskell has, if anything, even better
> >optimisation potential than something like C. With Haskell you can do
> >the crazy high-level optimisations that things like C would demand
> >really advanced alias-analysis. Compare this to low-level
> >optimisations which in Haskell require strictness analysis but in C
> >are easy. At some point high-level will become more important than
> >low-level, when it does, we win :-)
> >  
> 
> I had this conversation where Mr C++ basically said that my code 
> implements 3 loops and it's "not possible" to optimise that into just 1 
> loop like the C program is doing. Then I (or rather, Don) demonstrated 
> that the stream fusion library *has* optimised it into just 2 loops. 
> (Apparently the library isn't 100% complete as yet.)

Right, we haven't bothered with streaming versions of 'words'. 
However, the maximumBy and map happily fuse into a single loop.
   
> Hmm, perhaps to really show this off, we need a more complicated 
> program. Something that would be just too hard to implement as 1 loop in 
> C, but is easy for the GHC optimiser to build. I shall meditate on this 
> further...

Do you have the single loop C program, btw? I'd be curious to see if
this is really "feasible". It would have to do the buffering, tokenising
and accumulating in one go. I'd imagine it is a bit hairy.

And, it should not significantly outperform, say, a bytestring version.
If it does, I'd like to see that.

-- Don