Hello,

One frequent criticism of Haskell (and by extension GHC) is that it has unpredictable performance and memory consumption. I personally do not find this to be the case. I suspect that most programmer confusion is rooted in shaky knowledge of lazy evaluation; and I have been able to fix, with relative ease, the various performance problems I've run into. However I am not doing any sort of performance critical computing (I care about minutes or seconds, but not about milliseconds).

I would like to know what others think about this. Is GHC predictable? Is a thorough knowledge of lazy evaluation good enough to write efficient (whatever that means to you) code? Or is intimate knowledge of GHC's innards necessary?

thanks,
  Jeff

PS I am conflating Haskell and GHC because I use GHC (with its extensions) and it produces (to my knowledge) the fastest code.

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