[Haskell-cafe] vector to uvector and back again

[Dan Doel]

On Friday 26 February 2010 12:13:56 am Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> Dan, do you think you might be releasing your port of uvector-algorithms to
> vector any time soon? I've ported mwc-random to use vector, and I'd like to
> move statistics (which needs uvector-algorithms) and criterion (ditto) too.

I don't want to hold anything up, so I've released the port to vector. It's 
available on hackage as vector-algorithms 0.3:

  http://hackage.haskell.org/package/vector-algorithms

It's mostly a straight port, so not much new to learn.

- There's no ".Array" in the module names anymore.

- The Schwartzian transform combinators are gone from
  Data.Vector.Algorithms.Combinators, because I haven't decided on the best
  way to handle those yet (the existing implementation won't work on all
  vectors in the MVector class). Hope that isn't a problem.

- There's also a new module D.V.A.Search, which so far implements a couple
  variations on binary search. It was something I was starting before the
  switch to vector, so it isn't complete yet.

There are some moderate performance regressions on some of the algorithms, but 
nothing major. Also, the optimizer in 6.12 seems to get very confused when 
working with IO as the PrimMonad in question, resulting in significantly worse 
performance. So, I'd recommend sticking with ST, or at least making sure the 
algorithms are called in ST, with stToIO. HEAD is better on both these fronts, 
so things should get better in the future.

Let me know if there are any issues.*

-- Dan

* P.S. I just noticed I left the .cabal recommending -O2 and -fvia-c -optc-O3. 
That's obviously not current since the .cabal is set to compile with -Odph and 
with the NCG. I'll amend that in a later version. :)