Hi,
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Carter Schonwald
To the best of my knowledge there is absolutely no reason to use the 32bit haskell on OS X (aside from memory usage optimization cases which likely do not matter to the *typical* user), and the community should probably update the recommendation to reflect this.
The source of the recommendation are the benchmark results presented here: http://mtnviewmark.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/32-bits-less-is-more/ Note that it's very common to run other GC:ed languages, such as Java and Python, in 32-bit mode whenever possible. 32-bit almost halves the memory footprint and thus shortens GC pauses, in particular major ones, which are O(n) in the size of the heap. The problem of missing 32-bit C libraries might be a good reason for us to recommend 64-bit though and leave the 32-bit recommendation to people who know what they are doing. Cheers, Johan