Re: "Lambda Dance", Haskell polemic,...

4 Apr 2001


      "Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr"  wrote,
...
On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
...
"Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr"  wrote,
...
IMO, what's also important, is an infamous memory consumption. Everybody
seems to ignore it, but by now I wouldn't use Haskell in a commercial product, 
because of this little inconvenience. For me, it doesn't matter much if a
language is slow - as far as it's not very slow, it's ok. More important for
me is the predictability. I have to know how much memory my program will
eat. And in Haskell, with ghc the only sure answer is:
"Very much".
After profiling and removing space leaks?  In what kind of
applications did you encounter this problem?
I tried to profile my toy C compiler. The profiles simply didn't
work - the graph didn't convey any informations. I've informed about the bug
and let it go.
And besides, after rough testing, it seemed that memory usage grows linear
with a compiled program size. It was OK. But during the
compilation of 200KB program, my compiler ate AFAIR about 30MB of memory.
How much memory is gcc eating for a 200KB program?  If you
were to a write a toy C compiler in C++ or Java, do you
think, it would eat significantly less memory without
seriously tuning of the memory management?

Manuel