Performance/Floating point

Haskell Performance Resource Constructs: Data Types - Functions Overloading - FFI - Arrays Strings - Integers - I/O Floating point - Concurrency Modules - Monads Techniques: Strictness - Laziness Avoiding space leaks Accumulating parameter Implementation-Specific: GHC - nhc98 - Hugs Yhc - JHC

Don't use Float

Floats (probably 32-bits) are almost always a bad idea, anyway, unless you Really Know What You Are Doing. Use Doubles. There's rarely a speed disadvantage—modern machines will use the same floating-point unit for both. With Doubles, you are much less likely to hang yourself with numerical errors.

One time when Float might be a good idea is if you have a lot of them, say a giant array of Floats. An unboxed array of Float (see Performance:Arrays) takes up half the space in the heap compared to an unboxed array of Double. However, boxed Floats might take up less space than boxed Doubles if you are on a 32-bit machine (on a 64-bit machine, a Float still takes up 64 bits).