[Haskell-cafe] Re: Write Haskell as fast as C. [Was: Re: GHC predictability]

[Andrew Coppin]

Don Stewart wrote:
> I've written an extended post on how to understand and reliably optimise
> code like this, looking at it all the way down to the assembly.
>
> The result are some simple rules to follow for generated code as good
> as gcc -O2.
>
> Enjoy,
>
>     http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/05/16#fast
>   

A well-written piece, as always.

My feelings are ambivilent. On the one hand, it's reassuring that such 
good performance can be obtained without resorting to calling C, 
explicit unboxed types, GHC-specific hacks, strictness annotations, 
manual seq calls, strange case expressions, or really anything remotely 
odd. It's fairly plain Haskell '98 that most beginners would be able to 
read through and eventually understand. And yet it's fast.

On the other hand, this is the anti-theisis of Haskell. We start with a 
high-level, declarative program, which performs horribly, and end up 
with a manually hand-optimised blob that's much harder to read but goes 
way faster. Obviously most people would prefer to write declarative code 
and feel secure that the compiler is going to produce something efficient.

If the muse takes me, maybe I'll see if I can't find a less ugly way to 
do this...