[Haskell-cafe] Hugs/nhc getting progressively slower

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi,

I like to develop on Hugs, because its a nice platform to work with,
and provides WinHugs, auto-reloading, sub-second compilation etc.
Unfortunately some of the newer libraries (ByteString/Binary in
particular) have been optimised to within an inch of their lives on
GHC, at the cost of being really really slow on Hugs.

Taking the example of Yhc Core files, which are stored in binary.
Using a very basic hPutChar sequence is miles faster (10x at least)
than all the fancy ByteString/Binary trickery.

Taking the example of nobench, Malcolm told me he reimplemented
ByteString in terms of [Char] and gained a massive performance
increase (6000x springs to mind, but that seems way too high to be
true) using nhc.

Could we have a collective thought, and decide whether we wish to
either kill off all compilers that don't start with a G, or could
people at least do minimal benchmarking on Hugs? I'm not quite sure
what the solution is, but it probably needs some discussion.

Thanks

Neil