[Haskell-cafe] More good performance results for ghc 6.8

[Don Stewart]

Trying out some of the great language shootout programs with ghc 6.8 is
producing nice results. For example, our "classic" cache-hammering,
bitwise sieve benchmark is out of the box 10% faster with the new
compiler. The (already rather good) benchmark is here (the
same speed as the OCaml version under ghc 6.6):

    http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=nsievebits&lang=all

And timing with old and new ghc:

    ghc 6.6.1
        Primes up to 81920000  4774995
        Primes up to 40960000  2488465
        Primes up to 20480000  1299069
        ./A66 13  4.50s user 0.02s system 100% cpu 4.515 total

    ghc 6.8.1
        Primes up to 81920000  4774995
        Primes up to 40960000  2488465
        Primes up to 20480000  1299069
        ./A68 13  4.13s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 4.142 total

Lovely work GHC HQ, when low level, highly tuned code like this gets
magically faster!  Once 6.8 is in Gentoo (or earlier...) we should see
similar improvements across a range of shootout programs.

-- Don