On Jul 30, 2008, at 8:21 AM, Eric Kow wrote: > > Some bugs filed by the GHC team ... > [b] still too slow: http://bugs.darcs.net/issue973 ... > >> I have the idea that darcs-2 has not yet benefitted from newly >> developed >> Haskell tools such as profilers. > > As I mentioned on Reddit, darcs essentially suffers from the day job > problem. If we could get a Haskeller whose job is to work on darcs, > at least for a few months, I think we could make a lot of progress. > (The best candidate would of course have some experience with writing > fast Haskell, and of course, funding).
You're probably right that this would help, but on the other hand it probably isn't necessary. Many successful open source projects are done for love, not for money. For example, I'm pretty sure that hg (a candidate distributed revision control tool that the GHC developers are considering using) was produced solely as a hobby/ independent/pro bono project, and that bzr (one which the GHC developers have rejected) was developed by a team of people who were paid full-time to work on bzr and related technologies. On the other hand, many successful open source projects are supported financially. In any case, the next step for anyone who wants to improve darcs performance is probably to run a profiler on darcs on a large repository (e.g. ghc) in hashed format and in old-fashioned-inventory format. I don't know anything about the new Haskell profilers, but I bet that oprofile would yield interesting insights, and I'll bet a simple strace -T -r would, too. I've posted my notes about strace results before to the darcs-users list, but I didn't get any response. Perhaps I'll do so again using darcs-2.0.2 and a ghc repository. Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
