Ok, so I found that it was an instance of this: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1168

and I read through this whole thread: https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2008-February/014259.html

I don't understand the state-hack optimization. It's clearly not safe and I'm not convinced that it actually is an optimization. In what circumstances does the state-hack identify a single-entry function that can't be identified as single-entry by some other (safe) method?

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 10:52 AM, David Spies <dnspies@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a program I wrote to submit for the Car Game problem on Kattis: https://open.kattis.com/problems/cargame
but it runs over the 5-second time-limit

I downloaded the test data and found that on GHC 7.8.3, if I switch from -O2 to -O0, it runs three times faster (almost certainly fast enough for Kattis to accept). Can someone tell me what's going on? Is this a bug?