[Haskell-cafe] GHC predictability

[Abhay Parvate]

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 :)

2008/5/10 Jeff Polakow <jeff.polakow at db.com>:

>
> 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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