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

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Simon Marlow wrote:

> The upshot of what he found is that we could benefit from some
> prefetching, perhaps on the order of 10-20%.  Particularly prefetching
> in the allocation area during evaluation, to ensure that memory about to
> be written to is in the cache, and similar techniques during GC could
> help.  However, actually taking advantage of this is quite hard -
> prefetching instructions aren't standard, and even when they are getting
> any benefit can depend on cache architecture and other effects which
> vary between processor families.  Getting things wrong often results in
> a slowdown.  It's just too brittle.

Exactly:  prefetching sucks, particularly for a compiler supporting
multiple architectures, using native and via-C compilation.

Simon, did you ever try separating the code and data for each closure?

N