[Haskell-cafe] Why is this so inefficient?

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Jefferson Heard wrote:
> I thought this was fairly straightforward, but where the marked line
> finishes in 0.31 seconds on my machine, the actual transpose takes
> more than 5 minutes.  I know it must be possible to read data in
> haskell faster than this.

I took a look into this, writing a similar, but simpler, program.  Half
of the runtime, and 2/3 of the allocation, is spent in ByteString's
split function.  The remaining portions are spent in transposing the list.

COST CENTRE   %time %alloc  ticks     bytes
split          66.7   65.1     56 120130000
xpose          31.0   32.8     26  60618031
read            1.2    2.0      1   3640229
lines           1.2    0.1      1    260002

I've attached two programs to demonstrate the problem.  One creates a
sample speadsheet; the other transposes it.

I spent a little time trying to find a faster replacement for
ByteString.split, but no luck before I had to return to other things.

	<b
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