Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By : Samuli Thomasson
Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By: Samuli Thomasson

Overview of this book

Haskell, with its power to optimize the code and its high performance, is a natural candidate for high performance programming. It is especially well suited to stacking abstractions high with a relatively low performance cost. This book addresses the challenges of writing efficient code with lazy evaluation and techniques often used to optimize the performance of Haskell programs. We open with an in-depth look at the evaluation of Haskell expressions and discuss optimization and benchmarking. You will learn to use parallelism and we'll explore the concept of streaming. We’ll demonstrate the benefits of running multithreaded and concurrent applications. Next we’ll guide you through various profiling tools that will help you identify performance issues in your program. We’ll end our journey by looking at GPGPU, Cloud and Functional Reactive Programming in Haskell. At the very end there is a catalogue of robust library recommendations with code samples. By the end of the book, you will be able to boost the performance of any app and prepare it to stand up to real-world punishment.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Haskell High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Choosing the Correct Data Structures

Perhaps the next most important topic in Haskell performance after lazy evaluation is data structures. I say the next most important because although data structures form a wider area than lazy evaluation, the unique performance aspects of lazy evaluation should deserve more attention. Still, structuring data efficiently is a must for performance, and in Haskell this often requires taking laziness into account, too.

Haskell gives the programmer lots of variety and clutches to structuring data, ranging from low-level primitives to ingenious, purely functional data structures. The traditional (re-)implementation costs associated with quick'n'dirty versus highly optimized solutions are really low in Haskell, and therefore there are even fewer reasons for complex premature optimizations in Haskell than in many other languages.

This chapter will help you to understand the performance semantics of Haskell values in general and to write efficient programs...