On 11/9/07, Simon Peyton-Jones
| I just finished a running Bluespec's regression suite on a version of | our tools compiled with ghc 6.8.1. The results were impressive on two | fronts: | | 1. All of our tests (almost 14,000) had the same behavior as with ghc 6.6.1 | 2. Our Haskell code was roughly 33% faster (relative to ghc 6.6.1). It | seems that pointer-tagging made a big difference for our code base | (since, if I'm reading the release notes correctly, constructor | specialization isn't in yet). | | We just wanted to take a moment to say that we were pleasantly | surprised by ghc 6.8.1
Thanks for taking the time to let us know Ravi.
Constructor specialisation (aka call-pattern specialisation) is in 6.8.1; try -O2 and see what difference that makes. I'd be interested to know.
In that case, the 33% I cite above includes constructor specialization, since we compile with -O2 anyway. I just wasn't sure that it was in since it wasn't called out in the release notes. On that topic, does anyone know a clever way to get a more detailed changelog between 6.6.1 and 6.8.1? It would be useful for situations like that when I'm curious about changes that didn't make the release notes. Thanks, - Ravi