[Haskell] Programming language shootout (completing the Haskell entry)

[Adrian Hey]

On Monday 29 Mar 2004 3:49 pm, John Hughes wrote:
> Actually the cache behaviour of code generated by GHC isn't at all bad.
> I know because I ran a student project a couple of years ago to
> implement cache-friendly optimisations. The first thing they did was
> cache profiling of some benchmarks, and to our surprise we discovered
> the cache behaviour of lazy code is already pretty good. You get a lot
> of structure in the evaluation of lazy code -- it just isn't evident in
> the source code!

That's interesting. So why do you think "OCaml is so darned fast
compared to Haskell" :-)

Seriously though, is this finding consistent with the paper Nicholas
Nethercote mentioned? I had a quick read of the paper but didn't
take the time to digest the full significance of all tests done
and graphs presented. But if I understood the overall conclusions
correctly there were several reasons for relatively poor performance
on modern processors (one of which was a high rate of cache misses).
I suppose we should distinguish code from heap accesses here though.

Regards
--
Adrian Hey