Sam Mason wrote:

You probably want some strictness annotations in there. . .

Now we're getting somewhere. When I replace the tuples with my own (strict) data structure, it gets about 7.5 times faster than the original shootout example (or about 24 times faster than the version with tuples). I get another 2x speedup when I pass '+RTS -G1' to the executable. So the version below is about 15 times faster than the original using the 3MB data file from the shootout. (Now we're only about 40x slower than ocaml). Don't forget to turn on '-funbox-strict-fields' for an additional improvement. -- Compile with... -- ghc -O2 -ddump-simpl -fvia-c -funbox-strict-fields -o wc_fold2 wc_fold2.hs -- execute as... ./wc_fold2 +RTS -G1