[Haskell-cafe] Speeding up trivial programs

[amindfv at mailbox.org]

I'm working on a small program that has to run many, many times, as quickly as possible (yes, it needs to be a standalone program).

I've optimized it in many ways, but I seem to have a time floor, observable with "Hello, world"


    $ cat Hello.hs
    main = putStrLn "Hello world"
    $ ghc -O2 Hello.hs
    $ time ./Hello
    Hello world
    
    real    0m0.150s
    user    0m0.117s
    sys     0m0.032s


The equivalent program in C takes only 0.002s (75x faster).

What is taking the extra time? Is it the RTS "booting"? Is there any way to speed this up?

Thanks,
Tom