[Haskell-cafe] Text.PrettyPrint.HughesPJ is sloooow (and wl-pprint-text is fast)

[Evan Laforge]

I also get stack overflows from HughesPJ if I format something too big.

LW is more efficient by construction than HughesPJ.  The only reason I
switched to HPJ from LW is that I could never get LW to behave as I
wanted, but I'll probably wind up writing my own simpler formatter due
to the HPJ stack overflow problem.

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 5:36 AM, Johannes Waldmann
<waldmann at imn.htwk-leipzig.de> wrote:
> I was running into serious performance problems when printing moderately sized
> Doc and Xml data (HaXml goes via Doc).
>
> So I replace Text.PrettyPrint.HughesPJ with Text.PrettyPrint.Leijen.Text,
> and patched the HaXml printer in the same way. Now it is running much faster.
>
> This confirms some of the comments here:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9761507/which-pretty-print-library
>
> If you want to see for yourself, here is a test case.
> It constructs and prints a document tree with about 10^4 nodes,
> rendered to an Xml document with 10^6 (nonblank) chars:
> https://github.com/jwaldmann/haskell-tpdb/blob/master/test/speed.hs
>
> Of the 4 output methods (fin the main program), only one takes < 1 second.
> Rendering via HughesPJ needs extra stack (!) and takes about 20 seconds.
> Rendering via Text.XML.HaXml.ByteStringPP seems much slower still (!)
>
> (ghc-7.6.2, pretty-1.1.1.0, HaXml-1.23.3, wl-pprint-text-1.1.0.0,
> amd64, fedora 18, kernel 3.7.4)
>
>
>
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