[Haskell-cafe] {Probable Spam} transformers appears to benefit from more inline

[Ross Paterson]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 06:21:38PM +0000, Oliver Charles wrote:
> I've tried to put some fairly extensive benchmarks in place, which you can find
> at https://github.com/ocharles/monad-yield. In that repository is a README.md
> file that describes how I have been performing these benchmarks. The benchmarks
> are defined over a common interface that each implementation of MonadYield
> exports. The benchmarks are defined in "Benchmarks.hs", and the three
> implementations are "Transformers.hs" (using transformers from GHC),
> "TransformersInline.hs" (using transformers-ocharles from that repository,
> which has many more INLINE pragmas) and "Inline.hs" (which doesn't depend on
> anything other than base).
> 
> There are three main benchmarks that are ran - one is benchmarking essentially
> the cost of ReaderT, the next the cost of StateT, and the last a composition of
> ReaderT over StateT over ReaderT. The results of the benchmark can be found
> here: https://ocharles.github.io/monad-yield/.
> 
> It seems that the current darcs release of transformers loses every time, but
> if I sprinkle {-# INLINE #-} across the definition of lazy state, I get
> identical performance to just writing out the lazy state monad by hand.
> 
> I was very surprised to see that I have to pay when I use transformers, and it
> seems like this cost can be removed at the cost of slightly larger interface
> files.
> 
> Before I submit a patch, I'd love to hear others thoughts. Should {-# INLINE #
> -} be necessary? Is there any reason not to add it to every symbol in
> transformers?

Thanks for this analysis.  I've now added INLINE to just about everything,
per your suggestion.