[Haskell-cafe] Haskell performance

[Don Stewart]

Malcolm.Wallace:
> Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> > What would be v helpful would be a regression suite aimed at
> > performance, that benchmarked GHC (and perhaps other Haskell
> > compilers) against a set of programs, regularly, and published the
> > results on a web page, highlighting regressions.
> 
> Something along these lines already exists - the nobench suite.
>     darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/nobench
> It originally compared ghc, ghci, hugs, nhc98, hbc, and jhc.
> (Currently the results at
>     http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/nobench.html
> compare only variations of ghc fusion rules.)
> 
> I have just been setting up my own local copy - initial results at
>     http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/nobench/powerpc/results.html
> where I intend to compare ghc from each of the 6.4, 6.6 and 6.8
> branches, against nhc98 and any other compilers I can get working.
> I have powerpc, intel, and possibly sparc machines available.
> 
> > Like Hackage, it should be easy to add a new program.
> 
> Is submitting a patch against the darcs repo sufficiently easy?
> Should we move the master darcs repo to somewhere more accessible, like
> code.haskell.org?
> 
> > It'd be good to measure run-time,
> 
> Done...
> 
> > but allocation count, peak memory use, code size,
> > compilation time are also good (and rather more stable) numbers to
> > capture.
> 
> Nobench does already collect code size, but does not yet display it in
> the results table.  I specifically want to collect compile time as well.
> Not sure what the best way to measure allocation and peak memory use
> are?

Yeah, this is hard. There are various non-portable perl scripts
for this kind of thing, or +RTS -sstderr

-- Don