Re: [Haskell-cafe] How far compilers are allowed to go with optimizations?

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Austin Seipp wrote:

Now, on a slight tangent, in practice, I guess it depends on your target market. C programs don't necessarily expose the details to make such rich optimizations possible. And Haskell programmers generally rely on optimizations to make order of magnitude performance difference in constant factors, although perhaps not in direct big-O terms (and no, this isn't necessarily bad)

I think some GHC optimizations do change at least space usage, even in big-O terms. For example, strictness analysis can make folds go from O(n) to O(1) space, I think. Regards, Erik