[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: StrictBench 0.1 - Benchmarking code through strict evaluation

[Niemeijer, R.A.]

Hello everyone,

In the last month or so, I've found myself using the following snippet a lot:

import Control.Parallel.Strategies
import Test.BenchPress

bench 1 . print . rnf

This snippet fully evaluates a value and prints how long it took to do so. I regularly use it to see where the bottlenecks lie in my algorithms.  It has the minor annoyance, however, that it prints a lot of information (min, max, mean, median, percentiles) that is all identical, because I only run it once. The reason I only run it once is that I'm typically evaluating a pure value, which means that any subsequent attempts to benchmark the evaluation time will take no time at all, since it has already been evaluated.

To solve this, I decided to write a small library to make this process easier and only print the time taken once. The result is StrictBench, which can be found at http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/StrictBench.

A short example:

import Test.StrictBench

main = bench [1..10000000 :: Integer]

This code would give

2890.625 ms

as output. For the rest of the documentation I refer you to the Hackage page.

Regards,
Remco Niemeijer