
Hello Devs, When I started to work on GHC a few years back the Wiki recommended using nofib/spectral/simple/Main.hs as a test case for compiler performance changes. I've been using this ever since. "Recently" the cabal-test (compiling cabal-the-library) has become sort of a default benchmark for GHC performance. I've used the Cabal test as well and it's probably a better test case than nofib/spectral/simple/Main.hs. I've started using both usually using spectral/simple to benchmark intermediate changes and then looking at the cabal test for the final patch at the end. So far I have rarely seen a large difference between using cabal or spectral/simple. Sometimes the magnitude of the effect was different between the two, but I've never seen one regress/improve while the other didn't. Since the topic came up recently in a discussion I wonder if others use similar means to quickly bench ghc changes and what your experiences were in terms of simpler benchmarks being representative compared to the cabal test. Cheers, Andreas