Hello David, Thursday, June 21, 2007, 3:49:55 AM, you wrote:
A list of Word8 is -extremely- inefficient.
To expand on that terse (but very true) statement, a list of Word8 increases the space usage by a factor of probably around an order of magnitude (two pointers + 1 byte vs 1 byte), completely destroys your memory access pattern (which becomes random-access rather than sequential), and introduces additional nonlocal memory accesses. One would hope that a hash function would be moderately close to being memory-limited, so we're talking about a multiple-order-of-magnitude slowdown.
if this list is produced lazily, then it will live in generation-2 area of GC which is 256kb large. lists are slow due to double laziness -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com