[Haskell-cafe] Ray tracer benchmark: GHC 6.6 vs 6.8

[Jon Harrop]

Following Lennart Augustsson's improvements of the Haskell implementations of 
my ray tracer language comparison:

http://augustss.blogspot.com/2007/11/benchmarking-ray-tracing-haskell-vs.html

I thought I'd share the performance improvements offered by Lennart's new code 
with the latest release of GHC. Time in seconds to run the five versions on 
my Athlon64 X2 2.2GHz running 64-bit Debian Lenny:

ghc-6.6.1
22.0715339184
16.5431628227
13.3524830341
11.1260569096
6.33169198036

ghc-6.8.1
16.654654026
12.3998670578
7.8039829731
7.31486296654
6.03285193443

So 6.8 is up to a third faster!

The fastest implementations in other language run at around 4s, so Haskell has 
gone from being 3x slower in the previous implementations with GHC 6.6 to 
only 50% slower with the new implementations and new GHC.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e