Trying out some of the great language shootout programs with ghc 6.8 is producing nice results. For example, our "classic" cache-hammering, bitwise sieve benchmark is out of the box 10% faster with the new compiler. The (already rather good) benchmark is here (the same speed as the OCaml version under ghc 6.6): http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=nsievebits&lang=all And timing with old and new ghc: ghc 6.6.1 Primes up to 81920000 4774995 Primes up to 40960000 2488465 Primes up to 20480000 1299069 ./A66 13 4.50s user 0.02s system 100% cpu 4.515 total ghc 6.8.1 Primes up to 81920000 4774995 Primes up to 40960000 2488465 Primes up to 20480000 1299069 ./A68 13 4.13s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 4.142 total Lovely work GHC HQ, when low level, highly tuned code like this gets magically faster! Once 6.8 is in Gentoo (or earlier...) we should see similar improvements across a range of shootout programs. -- Don