[Haskell-cafe] speed: ghc vs gcc vs jhc

[John Meacham]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 02:24:59AM +0300, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello John,
> 
> Saturday, February 21, 2009, 2:14:25 AM, you wrote:
> 
> > Heh. He probably meant something more like "jhc is not a production
> > compiler" which is true for a lot of projects. For projects of
> > substantial size or that require many extensions, jhc falls somewhat
> > short. It is getting better though. Of course, help is always
> > appreciated. :)
> 
> what is "substantial size"? can jhc be used for video codec, i.e.
> probably no extensions - just raw computations, and thousands or tens
> of thousands LOCs?

Perhaps. A bigger issue in practice is that the larger a program is, the
more likely it is to depend on some library that depends on a ghc
extension. However, base is almost 10000 lines and jhc can compile that
into a library without too much effort nowadays, so it might scale.
If you try and find it fails, then please submit a bug report to
jhc at haskell.org. Too many bugs go unreported I find.

If the haskell code has an interface that is strict and unboxable (i.e.
only unboxable values passed, such as a video codec passing floats might
be) then compiling it with jhc and foreign exporting the functions then
foreign importing them into ghc for the bulk of the program would
probably work. Probably not worth the effort, but could be an
interesting experiment.

        JOhn

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈