On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 12:48:53PM +0200, Daniel Trstenjak wrote:
Hi Magnus,
When playing around with various implementations of a single function it would be nice to time the execution. Is there some way to do that easily from within GHCi?
ghci normally only interprets your code, without much optimizations, so your timings might be quite misleading.
Well, it might be enough to confirm or disprove intuitions about time complexity of an implementation; is it O(n) or O(n^2)? And that's really what I'd like to see at a first step. Given that all I'm interested in is relative timings it might even be enough to do a rough comparison of two implementations too.
Or am I forced to look to criterion for that?
I think so, if you want to trust your timings.
It's just a bit too much ceremony when all I want is to confirm that "inserting in reversed order followed by a `reverse`" has less time complexity than "repeated appending." Of course the only way to get something I can take to the bank is using criterion. /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus@therning.org jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus Heuristic is an algorithm in a clown suit. It’s less predictable, it’s more fun, and it comes without a 30-day, money-back guarantee. -- Steve McConnell, Code Complete