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Re: GHC predictability
by Abhay Parvate
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As a beginner, I had found the behaviour quite unpredictable. But with time I found that I could reason out the behaviour with my slowly growing knowledge of laziness. I don't spot all the places in my program that will suck while writing a program, but post facto many things become clear. (And then there is the profiler!)
GHC's internal details had been never necessary to me! I aspire to write computationally heavy programs in haskell in future, and I have been successful in reaching factors of 3 to 5 with C programs (though I have not been upto factors of 1 for which I find claims here and there) without any knowledge of GHC internals. But the GHC user guide is immensely valuable.
I would like to note that beginners' codes are many times time/memory consuming even in slighly complicated cases, and it may be a big source of frustration and turn-away if they don't stick up and pursue. This is not a problem of GHC, or even Haskell; it generally applies to functional programming.
These are my opinions; I am only an advanced beginner :)
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GHC's internal details had been never necessary to me! I aspire to write computationally heavy programs in haskell in future, and I have been successful in reaching factors of 3 to 5 with C programs (though I have not been upto factors of 1 for which I find claims here and there) without any knowledge of GHC internals. But the GHC user guide is immensely valuable.
I would like to note that beginners' codes are many times time/memory consuming even in slighly complicated cases, and it may be a big source of frustration and turn-away if they don't stick up and pursue. This is not a problem of GHC, or even Haskell; it generally applies to functional programming.
These are my opinions; I am only an advanced beginner :)
2008/5/10 Jeff Polakow <jeff.polakow@...>:
Hello,
One frequent criticism of Haskell (and by extension GHC) is that it has unpredictable performance and memory consumption. I personally do not find this to be the case. I suspect that most programmer confusion is rooted in shaky knowledge of lazy evaluation; and I have been able to fix, with relative ease, the various performance problems I've run into. However I am not doing any sort of performance critical computing (I care about minutes or seconds, but not about milliseconds).
I would like to know what others think about this. Is GHC predictable? Is a thorough knowledge of lazy evaluation good enough to write efficient (whatever that means to you) code? Or is intimate knowledge of GHC's innards necessary?
thanks,
Jeff
PS I am conflating Haskell and GHC because I use GHC (with its extensions) and it produces (to my knowledge) the fastest code.
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