[Haskell-cafe] How you can help improve Haskell implementations!

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

Just a quick note to say that the Haskell implementation shootout is
progressing, now supporting jhc, fixing a range of bugs, and providing
more benchmark programs. Nice average numbers are also reported for the
relative performance of each compiler or interpreter.

On x86:
    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/nobench/i686/results.html

On amd64:
    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/nobench/x86_64/results.html

Several bugs in our beloved Haskell compilers have been spotted, and
most of them already fixed!

** I'd like to invite contributions of benchmark programs**.

If you have a nice benchmarky program, that's reasonably portable
(mostly h98 + base libs is ok), and freely licensed, let me know, and we
can add it to the benchmark suite. Programs that show up interesting
results between systems or that were difficult to get to perform well
are particuarly welcome.

3 kinds of programs are welcome:

    * small artificial programs that illustrate particular issues
        e.g.  (prime sieves, FFT, great language shootout programs) 

    * 'kernels' from larger programs, that illustrate some functionality
        e.g. a mandelbrot generator, or some other core algorithm

    * larger real programs. These are particularly welcome. Limited to
      around 25 modules maximum, and capable of being run with simple
      stdin/args, producing simple output. Raytracers, chess programs,
      and small theorem provers are existing examples.

So send me your unwashed code. Whatever code doesn't kill them will only
make our compilers stronger! :-)

The darcs repo for nobench/nofib is at:

    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/nobench.html

Happy hacking!
   Don