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

[Johan Tibell]

Adding Mark who's the release manager for the platform (and also the
maintainer of the OS X builds).

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.