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

[Louis Wasserman]

Bulat,

Thank you for being productive. =)

of course these results are useful! my own goal was just to make fair
comparison. i'm bothered when people said that ghc should be used
for something like video codecs based on those "let's optimize only
for haskell" pseudo-benchmarks. if Don was omitted unoptimized gcc
results from is chart and you don't wrote those "conclusions" based on
the chart, i will never make this comment

Haskellers do need a baseline, y'know.  What I mean by that is, attempting
to write Haskell code that is as fast as gcc-optimized "typical" code is a
useful enterprise.  Of course it's possible to write a faster gcc program
than the one that Don compared to, but it's still a useful benchmark, and of
course it's not fair to optimize the heck out of Haskell code and leave gcc
code untouched and then say a comparison between *those* pieces of code is
fair.

I think we all agree on my original point now, that

   - Straightforward and simple Haskell code, written by an individual aware
   of issues with tail recursion and stream fusion, is frequently within 3x the
   speed of *straightforward and simple* GCC code when compiled with
   appropriate optimizations in GHC.

Sebastian, yes, there's still useful conversation to be had about more
super-heavily-optimized code.  (Bulat, if you'd like to continue posting
examples of more heavily optimized C and its outputted assembly, I think
that'd still provide a useful comparison in a conversation that can be
continued civilly on all sides.)

Louis Wasserman
wasserman.louis at gmail.com
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