Tillmann Rendel
Why should a Haskell hash table need more memory then a Python hash table? I've heard that Data.HashTable is bad, so maybe writing a good one could be an option.
One problem is that Haskell collections are lazy by default. I'm aware of a few use cases where laziness lets you formulate a very elegant recursive population of a collection, but I think that in general, strictness is what you want, and further, that if you want lazy, you store your data as one-tuples: data Lazy a = Lazy a (If there's a workaround/solution in the other direction, I'd really like to hear it). I'm therefore tempted to suggest that collections should be strict by default, and in particular, that there should be strict arrays for arbitrary types, not just the ones that happen to be unboxable. Unboxing should be an optimization for (some) strict arrays. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants