[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: nobench: Haskell implementaion benchmarks. GHC v Hugs v Yhc v NHC v ...

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

Ketil.Malde:
> Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> >Following recent discussion about a cross-implementation performance
> >benchmark suite, based on nofib, I've gone and combined nofib with the
> >great language shootout programs, and rewritten the build system to
> >support cross implementation measurements.
> >  
> Great work!
> 
> ..but I wonder if the shootout is really the kind of code that is ideal
> for compiler benchmark.  Typically (at least based on what I've seen
> of the submissions) they tend to be fairly heavily tuned, using 
> optimizations
> that are a) obfuscating the code and b) tuned specifically for GHC.

They exercise the pointy end of things. Specifically, mutable arrays,
double precision math and bytestrings. Stuff we don't have tests for in
nofib, that has performed poorly in the past (till we noticed it on the
shootout..). This kind of code does get written in practice (and when it
is written, it is usually because it needs to be fast).

So I think the few that were added are useful.

More category 'real' programs could be contributed, though.

-- Don