Hi
Could we have a collective thought, and decide whether we wish to either kill off all compilers that don't start with a G, or could people at least do minimal benchmarking on Hugs? I'm not quite sure what the solution is, but it probably needs some discussion.
I don't think doing minimal benchmarking on hugs will help at all unless we are prepared to act on it and I'm pretty sure anything we do to improve hugs performance will be detrimental to the GHC performance.
#ifdef? Malcolm has a ByteString implementation that runs much faster under nhc, and I suspect would also run faster under Hugs. Why not have a big #ifdef around the difference?
With hugs/yhc/nhc I assume the optimisation technique is simply to minimise the number of primitive reduction steps. This is really totally different. I don't see any obvious way of reconciling the two in a single implementation of an interface. Having totally different implementations of an interface for different Haskell systems is an option though it has obvious disadvantages.
I can see that two implementations are undesirable, but at the moment people have a choice: to write fast GHC and slow Hugs (ByteString), or to write slow GHC and fast Hugs (String). If we could make ByteString the "right answer" always, then I think its a much nicer choice. For the particular case of ByteString, type ByteString=String means you roughly import Data.List - not that much additional work or maintenance.
So I don't know what to do. We're not stopping out quest for high performance idiomatic code because it doesn't play nicely with interpreters.
Indeed, and you shouldn't! Your quest for nice idiomatic code has saved countless programmers from low-level IO prodding, and for that we salute you! However, if you could at least give a nod in the direction of Hugs, even if you get to 50% slower than before, it keeps Hugs at least useable with the new API's. Thanks Neil