Hello everyone, I noticed that Prelude break and span Core uses boxed tuples which is quite expensive. Since functions from Prelude are used everywhere, many programs will benefit from their optimization. Please see my implementation which uses internal worker function and unboxed tuples. In the best case it could perform more than twice faster than Prelude functions. import Criterion.Main newspan :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> ([a], [a]) newspan p xs = go xs where go xs@[] = (xs, xs) go xs@(x:xs') | p x = case go xs' of (ys, zs) -> (x:ys,zs) | otherwise = ([], xs) newbreak :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> ([a], [a]) newbreak p xs = go xs where go xs@[] = (xs, xs) go xs@(x:xs') | p x = ([], xs) | otherwise = case go xs' of (ys, zs) -> (x:ys,zs) versus f1 f2 pred arg = [ bench "new" $ whnf (f1 pred) arg , bench "prelude" $ whnf (f2 pred) arg ] variousLists f1 f2 pred = [ bgroup "fullMatch" $ versus f1 f2 pred (replicate 1000 1 :: [Int]) , bgroup "failOnFirst" $ versus f1 f2 (not . pred) (replicate 1000 1 :: [Int]) , bgroup "emptyList" $ versus f1 f2 pred ([]::[Int]) ] main = defaultMain [ bgroup "span" $ variousLists newspan span (==1) , bgroup "break" $ variousLists newbreak break (/=1) ] -- Regards, Boris