Hi, I'm in search of clarifications and descriptions about code optimisations that are recommended in GHC docs, regarding inlining and newtype vs data. 1. Inlining small and often used functions See https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/pragmas.html , Section "7.22.6.1. INLINE pragma". It says: "GHC tries to inline functions/values that are 'small enough', thus avoiding the call overhead and possibly exposing other more-wonderful optimisations." I understand the reason for function inlining with other languages like C, as it avoids the construction of new stack frames and coordinating stack pointers for each function call. In Haskell, rather than call stack we've got evaluation stacks. Here are my questions: what exactly is the call overhead of a non-inlned Haskell function? What additional runtime work needs to happen when calling to a non-inlined function? Specifically what other GHC optimisations are possible only if function inlining happens first? Can anyone provide a simple example where 1) a function is not inlined, versus 2) when that function is inlined, which demonstrates two things: 1) a GHC report of the additional optimisations that were applied because of inlining and 2) shorter program runtime as a result of inlining. 2. Calculating the memory costs of a data type As Don Stewart nicely explains on SO http://stackoverflow.com/a/5889784/1526266 , we should always use newtype when we have only a single constructor which has a single field. His example is this: data Book = Book Int Int newtype Book = Book (Int, Int) With newtype, the `Book` construct is guaranteed to be erased at compile time, to have the same representation as `(Int,Int)`. How to I measure the memory space costs of having `Book Int Int` hanging around at runtime, as opposed to just `(Int,Int)`? How many bytes does it cost to store `Book 4 5`? How many bytes does it cost to store `(4,5)` ? Can I ask GHC to tell me how many bytes the storage of each object would require? Or more generally, would looking at GHC Core for all my data structures inform me of the memory space costs for each of them? Thanks -- Rob