Background: I participated in this year's ICFP programming contesthttp://www.icfpcontest.organd our team did quite well, coming in 37th. Our simulator (in somewhat naive C++ with a good algorithm) took about 45 seconds to run the original problem, and afterwards one of my coworkers took the same algorithm and optimized it to run in about 6-10 seconds. The rest of the email will have minor spoilers, so skip it if you want to work on the problem yourself. I'm using that problem as a good testcase for learning to write high-performance Haskell. I'm using the same data structure and basic algorithm as the C++ version, but I'm having problems getting the performance where I think it should be. The relevant parts of the code:

import qualified Data.ByteString.Base as B import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as BC

type DNABlock = B.ByteString type DNA = [DNABlock]

I represent the DNA string as a simplified ropehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(computer_science)that supports fast reading from the front & prepending. To access this in a reasonable fashion, I used a view to let me treat the data as a string. Here's a sample bit of code using that view:

matchConsts :: Int -> DNA -> (Int, DNA) matchConsts len dna | len `seq` dna `seq` False = undefined -- force strictness matchConsts len dna = case dnaView dna of ('F':_) -> matchConsts (len+1) (dropDna 1 dna) ('C':_) -> matchConsts (len+1) (dropDna 1 dna) ('P':_) -> matchConsts (len+1) (dropDna 1 dna) ('I':'C':_) -> matchConsts (len+2) (dropDna 2 dna) _ -> (len, dna)

dropDna :: Int -> DNA -> DNA dropDna n dna | n `seq` dna `seq` False = undefined -- force strictness dropDna _ [] = [] dropDna 0 dna = d dropDna n (d:ds) | n >= BC.length d = dropDna (n - BC.length d) ds | otherwise = B.unsafeDrop n d : ds {-# INLINE dropDna #-}

Profiling showed that almost all of my time & allocations were spent in my view function:

dnaView :: DNA -> String -- dnaView d = foldr (++) [] (map BC.unpack d) -- This was ridiculously slow for some reason that I don't entirely understand dnaView [] = [] dnaView (d:ds) | BC.null d = dnaView ds | otherwise = (w2c $ B.unsafeHead d) : dnaView (B.unsafeTail d : ds) {-# INLINE dnaView #-}

The question I have for you, the haskell-cafe-reading-audience, is how can I get GHC to do smart code-gen for this? I want "case dnaView dna of ..." to not allocate and instead fuse the list generation with the pattern-match. -- ryan