[Haskell-cafe] 64-bit vs 32-bit haskell platform on Mac: misleading notice on Platform website?

[Erik Hesselink]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Carter Schonwald
> <carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:
>> To the best of my knowledge there is absolutely no reason to use the 32bit
>> haskell on OS X (aside from memory usage optimization cases which likely do
>> not matter to the *typical* user), and the community should probably update
>> the recommendation to reflect this.
>
> The source of the recommendation are the benchmark results presented here:
>
> http://mtnviewmark.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/32-bits-less-is-more/
>
> The problem of missing 32-bit C libraries might be a good reason for
> us to recommend 64-bit though and leave the 32-bit recommendation to
> people who know what they are doing.

We switched to a 64bit GHC recently for this exact reason. The 64bit
libraries are either already installed, or can easily be installed
through e.g. brew. For 32bit libraries, we sometimes had to compile
from source, passing all kinds of flags. The downside for us is
doubling the memory usage, but that's more easily solved (with more
memory). I haven't noticed the performance reduction.

So in short, I think the 64bit version should be the default
recommendation on OS X.

Erik