[Haskell-cafe] proposal: HaBench, a Haskell Benchmark Suite

[Paul Moore]

On 29/01/07, Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote:
> We found these categories to be useful and robust, and I think they'd be useful for the new
> suite.  In particular, the imaginary suite is useless for (say) choosing a compiler, but
> fantastic for exposing particular weak spots.   But if the imaginary programs were mixed with
> the real ones, the whole thing would lose credibility.

One thing I'd like to see, but I have no idea if it would be
practical, is an attempt to distinguish between "idiomatic" and
"highly optimised" benchmarks. Given that optimising Haskell code is a
complex problem - and often unfamiliar to programmers coming from
other backgrounds - this would be useful for isolating how well a
compiler does at dealing with code which is *not* written purely for
speed.

As I say, though, this may be impossible to achieve in practice
(although something may be possible at the "imaginary program" level).

Paul.