[Haskell-cafe] First call to putStr takes far more time than subsequent calls

[Ben Gunton]

When a module is imported, or used for the first time, are there things
that are not fully evaluated?

I see the same thing you do with the Data.Fixed methods (nice work by the
way!), but I also see similar (albeit less drastic) behaviour with other
datatypes, including some custom ones. It just always seems like the first
call to a modules method is always slower than subsequent calls. But I
can't for the life of me figure out why...

On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:

> This is a nice puzzle. However, I don't think it's related to IO.
>
> So far I've traced this to Data.Fixed methods. If you add
>
>   evaluate $ floor (2/1 :: Fixed E12)
>
> before the loop, you'll find that the delay decreases significantly
> (although doesn't vanish entirely).
>
> How is this related to forcing a time value? Well, UTCTime represents
> the time of day as Fixed E12, and when you're evaluating the result of
> getCurrentTime, you're calling those methods, (/) and floor.
>
> Using other methods of Fixed E12 before the loop, or replacing E12 with
> E9, kills or at least hurts the effect.
>
> There might be some thunks referenced directly or indirectly by those
> methods, possibly involving specialization, but I don't see it so far.
>
> I'll let someone else to take it from here.
>
>
> On 10/07/15 00:07, Ben Gunton wrote:
> > Here is the same thing with no console usage, just forcing the time
> > value. The first-iteration-delay seems to happen at the first IO-ish
> > thing being evaluated.
> >
> > http://lpaste.net/136254
>
>
>
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