[Haskell-cafe] Optimizing Haskell compilers

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> I've heard that there are a plethora of Haskell compilers available. Which
> others give performance comparable to GHC?

None. If you want a stable, well supported, currently maintained, fast
Haskell compiler, then that's GHC. (in fact, if you drop fast from
that list, you are still left with GHC...)

hbc is faster than GHC for some stuff, but hasn't been maintained in a while.

Jhc is being worked on, with the goal of beating GHC. They have good
performance, but don't really work on many programs, and I'd buy a
server farm before compiling the Prelude.

Supero is in development, and has promising initial benchmarks. I'm
hoping to give a presentation at AngloHaskell on Supero, so hopefully
by then I'll have some good benchmarks. I'm actually hacking it as we
speak. http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/supero/ (look at the blog
posts)

So realistically, at the moment you have only GHC. The future may open
up more options.

Thanks

Neil