On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Conal Elliott <conal@conal.net> wrote:

I think Jake is referring to my vector-space package. He did the work of writing 171 INLINE pragmas, covering lots of methods and standalone function defs. I'm simultaneously grateful for the effort and repelled by the added syntactic noise. Also concerned about the impact of all these directives on other uses of vector-space. If all this inlining is a uniform win, I'd rather ghc did it for me.

Alas, it very much is not easy to predict. The unfortunate thing about inline directives is that each individual one really can have a substantial, but not necessarily predictable, effect on the performance of an application. I have seen large improvements in performance, large drops in performance, nothing at all, and everything in between, and I have yet to develop a consistently successful intuition about what will work well, and when.