[Haskell-cafe] GHC vs GCC vs JHC

[Rafael Cunha de Almeida]

John Meacham wrote:
> Here are jhc's timings for the same programs on my machine. gcc and ghc
> both used -O3 and jhc had its full standard optimizations turned on.
> 
> jhc:
> ./hs.out  5.12s user 0.07s system 96% cpu 5.380 total
> 
> gcc:
> ./a.out  5.58s user 0.00s system 97% cpu 5.710 total
> 
> ghc:
> ./try  31.11s user 0.00s system 96% cpu 32.200 total
> 
> 
> As you can see, jhc shines at this example, actually beating gcc -O3. It
> isn't too surprising, this is exactly the sort of haskell code that jhc
> excels at.

What's the property of that code which makes jhc excels in it? What
makes ghc perform so poorly in comparison?