firefly:
What do you think the relative speeds are of the six small haskell programs at the end of this email?
All they do is read from stdin and count the number of spaces they see. There are two that use strict bytestrings, two that use lazy bytestrings, and two that use the standard Haskell strings. Three use a recursive function with an accumulator parameter and three use a foldl with a lambda function.
Say the fastest one takes the time 1. How much time will the others take?
And how about memory? How much memory do you think they require? Let's say we feed a 150MB(*) file into each of them, how many megabytes do you think they end up using (as seen from the OS, not in terms of how big the live heap is)?
I'm going to post full benchmarks + analysis on Wednesday.
How are you compiling these programs, by the way? ghc-6.8.2 -O2 ? (-O2 is required for bytestrings :) -- Don