[Haskell-cafe] GHC predictability

[Jeff Polakow]

Hello,

One frequent criticism of Haskell (and by extension GHC) is that it has 
unpredictable performance and memory consumption. I personally do not find 
this to be the case. I suspect that most programmer confusion is rooted in 
shaky knowledge of lazy evaluation; and I have been able to fix, with 
relative ease, the various performance problems I've run into. However I 
am not doing any sort of performance critical computing (I care about 
minutes or seconds, but not about milliseconds). 

I would like to know what others think about this. Is GHC predictable? Is 
a thorough knowledge of lazy evaluation good enough to write efficient 
(whatever that means to you) code? Or is intimate knowledge of GHC's 
innards necessary?

thanks,
  Jeff

PS I am conflating Haskell and GHC because I use GHC (with its extensions) 
and it produces (to my knowledge) the fastest code.


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