Hi!
My guess is that it was premature optimization that created this bug.
It is the root of all evil. ;-)
Unboxed tuples are not the best answer for every situation. They are evaluated strictly!
Then I have not understood the last paragraph correctly: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/primitives.html Oh, no. It is like you say. I also use -funbox-strict-fields and Q is defined with strict fields. But I tried also without the switch and is it the same (it takes forever). But then qN and qN' does not have unboxed types. So it should be lazy?
If you are in that phase where you are doing performance tweaks and you think GHC's strictness analysis might not be picking up on some strict behavior in your program, add the annotation. If it makes it faster, great; if it doesn't change things, take it out! Best to underconstrain your program.
I completely agree. I am also a firm believer in the clean and pure code where I would leave all optimization to compiler and just write semantics into a program. But this project just showed me that there is still a long way of compiler development before that would be possible (and usable). That some simple refactoring of code which is not really changing semantics have a big influence on a performance because compiler uses it differently (polymorphic types instead of hardcoded types, passing function as an parameter instead of hardcode it). For example I have now defined my types as: type BasicReal = Double data Quaternion = Q !BasicReal !BasicReal !BasicReal !BasicReal deriving (Eq,Show) So that I can easily change the type everywhere. But it would be much nicer to write: data Quaternion a = Q !a !a !a !a deriving (Eq,Show) Only the performance of Num instance functions of Quaternion is then quite worse. Mitar