[Haskell-cafe] ghc and jump table generation

[Erik Rantapaa]

I've been looking at the assembly code that ghc generates for simple pattern matching for situations like:

foo :: Int -> Int
foo 1 = 3
foo 2 = 10
foo 3 = 2
foo 4 = 42
-- ... other random assignments

and I noticed that it doesn't seem to generate a jump table (or even a table lookup)  like, for instance, gcc would for this switch statement:

int foo(int x) {
  switch (c) {
    case 1: return 3;
    case 2: return 10;
    case 3: return 2;
    case 4: return 42;
    // ... etc.
  }
}

Under -O3 ghc seems to produce a binary-search of the cases.

Questions: Would generating a jump/lookup table for pattern matches like this (i.e. with a suitable density of cases) be beneficial? And, if so, would it be difficult to add to ghc? And would it be a good first project for someone who wants to get into the ghc code base (perhaps with some mentoring from the community?)