Hello Simon, Tuesday, June 27, 2006, 1:44:45 PM, you wrote:
I wanted to write to inform you how shocked I was to see the great advances in performance in the Glorious Haskell Compiler over the last year or so. Of course, we have also benefited from some great contributions by the folks on the Haskell-Cafe mailing list.
it's nice to read but completely false, you know. GHC don't improved it's speed over last year, 6.4.2 differs from 6.4 only in reliability areas source of this great progress is really work of Haskell fans, especially Donald Bruce Stewart. moreover, i quickly scanned the tests where GHC still far behind it's competition and in most cases speed is determined by libraries. when ghc 6.6 with ByteString library included will roll out, we will got higher marks in all those tests except for mandelbrot, which really depends on compiler speed by itself. and in this test we can see Clean and OCaml with gcc-like speed and GHC what is 10 times slower. the only Haskell compiler that will be a great performer here is JHC, i think in all other tests speed is defined by libraries (as i see, Shootout is more a test of bundled libs than compilers) or by hand-optimized code for GHC comparing to the "normal", readable code for other languages. what this proves? first, that libs is exceptionally important for overall speed and interpreted language with fast C-written libs (say, Tcl) may perform better than compiled language like Haskell. second, that the naive implementations are very far from optimum and hand-optimized program in slow language can easily outperform naive program in fast one this great progress in last year says much more about Haskell community and, indirectly, about attractiveness of Haskell. it's a really great language but don't say that GHC and GCC can be compared on their speed ... this remembered me another important question. who is determined which projects to include in Google SoC financing? i read the proposals list and was very pleased by final choice of financed projects - it's really what i consider as most important areas for Haskell infrastructure growth - network, installation, byte strings, data structures. the only two projects not supported that was interesting for me, is about optimization - one about adding something to speed up programs compiled by GHC (i don't remember exactly), second - about further development of JHC. why these projects was not selected? it were no students interested or these projects considered as less important? can i next year participate in discussion/election of projects that will be supported? i want to say especially about JHC. we need to have GHC alternatives - just because competition is best source of evolution. from my POV, jhc is especially interesting as GHC alternative because it's the only compiler oriented to optimized compilation. Hugs, nhc has other directions of evolution (learning and debugging), while adding to jhc modern language extensions should make it real GHC competition (and jhc already generates native C code, so it will have at least one substantial advantage over GHC) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com