[Haskell-cafe] Strings in Haskell

[Seth Gordon]

John Meacham wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 09:37:21PM -0500, Bryan Donlan wrote:
> 
>>Or you can get the best of both worlds by using Data.ByteString.Lazy :)
>>Even with laziness, all the indirections that String causes hurts 
>>performance.
> 
> 
> actually, strictness analysis is really good at unboxing things like
> this, so the indirections probably hurt less than one would initially
> think.

One thing that's impressed me with the Haskell application I'm currently
working on (as I am trying to bully the code into handling 10M rows of
data, which must all be kept in memory at once, without keeling over) is
how often adding explicit strictness annotations *hasn't* improved
performance.  I guess this means that GHC's strictness analysis isn't
much worse than my own.

(and that my algorithms are such crap that issues of laziness/strictness
are the least of my problems... :-)