[Haskell-cafe] Analyzing slow performance of a Haskell program

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Chris Yuen <kizzx2+haskell at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> For reference I have asked the same question on StackOverflow. One person
> suggested that the reason might be that Int64 on Windows is broken (
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6970904/analyzing-slow-performance-of-a-haskell-program/6976448#6976448
> ).
>

No, they're barking up the wrong tree.

I've put an idiomatic Haskell translation of your C++ algorithm at
https://gist.github.com/1133048#file_wordy.hs

(I've also included a copy of your original C++, with a bug fixed, in the
same gist.)

As you can see, the two are almost identical. Not surprisingly, each one
spends the bulk of its time computing word lengths.

GHC simply doesn't do a great job of compiling fairly tight code like this.
gcc generates about 100 lines of assembly that's mostly easy to follow
(except for some bit-twiddling tricks to avoid div instructions). Although
the Core it generates looks fine, GHC spends quite a bit of time in its
generated assembly on what looks to me like STG housekeeping (it spends only
0.3% of its time in the garbage collector, because it doesn't allocate
memory). The overall result is that the Haskell code runs about 5x more
slowly than the C++ code.
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