the long answer is: are you ever heard promises that gcc is best cpu-independent assembler? no? and you know why? because gcc is not cpu-independent assembler. gcc was strongly optimized to make efficient asm from the code usually written by the C programmers. but code generated by ghc has nothing common with it. so we are stay with all these register-memory moves, non-unrolled loops and all other results of naive compilation. gcc is just don't know how to efficiently manage such code!
would there be any advantage to targetting gcc's backend directly? I notice that Mercury seems to support this: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/download/gcc-backend.html http://gcc.gnu.org/frontends.html that is, does using C as assembler disable possible optimizations, or is going through the C frontend enabling more optimizations than going to the backend directly? just curious, claus