Darcs

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

David Roundy wrote:
>> Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
>>> Maybe we should just invest that effort into helping David improve  
>>> his
>>> code instead.
>>
>> This idea occurred to me too, and there's probably a lot we could  
>> do to
>> improve darcs with a few days of Ian's and my time.  Something to  
>> think
>> about, definitely.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> 	Simon
>
> That would most definitely be appreciated! But not just yet: if  
> you're only
> going to devote a few days' time (which makes sense: none of us want  
> ghc
> neglected!), I'd rather pick the low-hanging fruit first, and then  
> let you
> handle the tougher cases.
>
> At least to start with, the most helpful thing you could do with  
> darcs is
> just find test cases where the performance lags behind that of older  
> darcs.
> Or also cases where it has always been unacceptable, but such  
> problems are
> less likely to be quickly fixable.  This is all to say, in a week or  
> two,
> when you've got a shiny new version of darcs to play with...

It seems to be that of the problems with the current version of darcs  
that Simon described in this initial email, performance is really the  
one major problem that is not addressed by David's new work.  At the  
same time, GHC developers seem to be the sort of people who know a lot  
about how to write fast Haskell programs.  So, I am thinking  
performance optimisations might quite possibly be the area where we  
could help David out most effectively - maybe Don could have a look at  
that, too.  Does that make sense?

Manuel