On 25-Nov-1999, George Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think the GHC developers have got their priorities about right. Yes, GHC
> is slow, hard to build, and big. That's because it's a research project.
Making GHC easier to build would make it easier for researchers;
it might well increase the number of GHC developers.
> It's more important now to concentrate on demonstrating that Haskell is a good
> language for all sorts of real programming problems. It won't be so hard to
> speed up GHC later if that becomes important.
I wouldn't be quite so confident about that last point. If it was not
designed with speed in mind, then speeding up it up later will probably
be quite difficult; it may well be simpler to rewrite most of it.
When you first write a program, it will typically be very efficient,
and with a bit of profiling, it's typically easy to speed it up by
a factor of say ten. But once you've done that, once you've already
eliminated all the _easy_ improvements, then improving the performance
by the remaining factor of say five can be very difficult indeed.
It's my impression that the ghc developers have probably already
done most of the easy speed improvements, and that getting it to
match the speed of the Clean compiler would be a difficult task.
Personally I think the main reason that the Clean team has managed to
achieve such a fast compiler that still generates fast code is because
they wrote their compiler in C.
Of course the Clean team are good evangalists for lazy functional
programming, and so they will doubtless strongly deny that this is the
reason, pointing to the fact that even as we speak, they are busy on
writing a new version in Clean. But I'm sure that if they'd written
the first version in Clean or Haskell, its compilation speed would
be more akin to that of ghc.
But I've had a couple of glasses of wine tonight, so perhaps I am
just being deliberately provocative ;-)
--
Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
