[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell performance

[Don Stewart]

jon:
> On Thursday 20 December 2007 19:02, Don Stewart wrote:
> > Ok, so I should revive nobench then, I suspect.
> >
> >     http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/nobench/x86_64/results.html
> >
> > that kind of thing?
> 
> Many of those benchmarks look good.
> 
> However, I suggest avoiding trivially reducible problems like computing 
> constants (e, pi, primes, fib) and redundant operations (binary trees). Make 
> sure programs accept a non-trivial input (even if it is just an int over a 
> wide range). Avoid unnecessary repeats (e.g. atom.hs). This will mean that 
> transformations that improve performance on the benchmark suite will be more 
> likely to improve the performance of real programs.

This is a long recognised issue. The benchmark suite is a variant of the nofib suite, described here:

    http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/partain93nofib.html

which breaks the programs up into imaginary, spectral and real
categories of programs.

> I would recommend adding:
> 
> 1. FFT.
> 
> 2. Graph traversal, e.g. "n"th-nearest neighbor.
> 
> These should be <100LOC each.

Sounds good. Patches can be sent via darcs.

-- Don