Dear GHC developers and users, Here are some impressions on ghc-6.4. Cabal ----- It looks good. Thanks to developers. Long ago I asked for the building tool in GHC which would allow to avoid composing Makefile-s, with their difficult syntax and odd-looking system commands: `ar', `ld', and such. Now, Cabal does what I asked for. Remarks: * maybe, `version' should not be mandatory in the package specification? * " version: 5.02 " (imagine "ghc-5.02") converts to "5.0.2" . Could it allow digit sequences separated by period? -O, memory management --------------------- In ghc-6.2.2 the test for dumatel-1.02 runs 2 times faster when Dumatel is built under -O. And in ghc-6.4, the time does not differ. Then, I tried the benchmark with certain mixture of list operations: user-written maximum and mergeSort, `reverse' and `zip' of GHC -- find enclosed the source. -O is 1.3 faster than -Onot. The speed looks like in ghc-5.02 (I think, this is all right). 5.02 was able to run `main' for n = 55000 in 200 Kb memory. 6.4 needs 2600 Kb. Probably, 5.02 is distinguished among other versions in memory management. Regards, ----------------- Serge Mechveliani mechvel@botik.ru *************************************************************** -- the result of `main' must be n-1. main = putStr $ shows (test 55000 ) "\n" -- n -- to edit test :: Int -> Int test n = max' $ sort' $ zipWith (-) (reverse xs) xs where xs = [1..n] max' :: Ord a => [a] -> a max' [x] = x max' (x:y:xs) = case compare x y of LT -> max' (y:xs) _ -> max' (x:xs) sort' :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] sort' xs = s $ mergePairs [[x] | x <- xs] where s [] = [] s [xs] = xs s xss = s $ mergePairs xss mergePairs (xs:ys:zss) = (merge xs ys):(mergePairs zss) mergePairs xss = xss merge :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] merge [] ys = ys merge xs [] = xs merge (x:xs) (y:ys) = case compare x y of GT -> y:(merge (x:xs) ys) _ -> x:(merge xs (y:ys))