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 9. GHC Internals and Code Generation

In the previous chapter, we learned to tweak options in GHC and Runtime System. In this chapter, we will dive into GHC's internal language, Core. We will learn to read Core and to spot possible problems in Core. Such problems arise when, for instance, the strictness analyzer left an argument lazy and boxed, while it would have been a lot more performant to make it strict and unboxed. We can basically just read such situations from Core, because strictness is explicit and unboxed arguments are always output with hashes.

Recall that the hash suffix is referred to as the magic hash in Haskell. Magic hashes mark primitive functions and types (those provided by GHC itself). We call these primops. In this chapter, we will learn to program with primops directly. Sometimes raw primop programming is an easy way to get reliably good performance. Also, a lesser-known fact is that GHC supports some SIMD operations via the LLVM backend. As of now, SIMD support...