[Haskell-cafe] Hugs faster and more reliable than GHC for large list monad 'do' block

[Henning Thielemann]

Today a student has shown me a program that consists of a large 'do' 
block for the list monad. The program looks like

    do x1 <- [0..3]
       x2 <- [0..2]
       ...
       x600 <- [0..5]
       guard (x1+x2+2*x3 >= 0)
       ...
       return (x1,x2,....,x600)

It was actually generated by another program. The results were:

  GHC-6.4 was not able to compile that program at all, because it stopped 
because of memory exhaustion.
  GHC-6.8.2 finished compilation after two minutes but the program aborted 
quickly because of a corrupt thunk identifier.
  GHC-6.10 not yet tested.
  Hugs-2006 executed the program without complaining and showed the first 
result after a few seconds: (0,0,0,0,0,...,0).

Eventually the program must run on a Linux cluster with a not up-to-date 
Linux kernel, that is, I suspect newer GHC versions cannot be used due to 
the 'timer_create' problem. (At least, the 'cabal' executable that I 
generated with a GHC-6.8.2 had this problem when running on the cluster 
which reminded me on the problems with GHC-6.8 itself running on older 
Linux kernels.)

Since the list monad sorts the variable values in lexicographic order 
which is inappropriate for the considered problem, I recommended the use 
of control-monad-omega. Luke, I hope this monad can cope with 600 
variables. :-)