[Haskell-cafe] forLoop + strict State monad is much faster than foldl'

[Niklas Hambüchen]

On 30/04/14 12:41, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> Did you look at the GHC Core generated? When starting to investigate
> performance issues, reading Core simply is required – otherwise it’s
> like search for a lost plain while refusing to look under the water
> surface.

Of course. A short look with ghc-core on

  import Data.List
  main = print (foldl' (*) 0 [0..100000::Int])

reveals that the original list traversal is still present:

  $wlgo =
    \ (ww_s1HD :: Int#) (w_s1HF :: [Int]) ->
      case w_s1HF of _ {
        [] -> ww_s1HD;
        : x_asn xs_aso ->
          case x_asn of _ { I# y_asz ->
          $wlgo (*# ww_s1HD y_asz) xs_aso
          }
      }

There is not much point investigating further until collecting the
responses from this list - as it turned out, you already fixed the
problem. Thanks!

For performance-critical code, it seems sensible for me to stick to my
`forLoop` for now, as it works quite well with the existing GHCs and
much less brain seems to be necessary to get that compile down to fast code.