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

Tuning GHC's Runtime System


GHC's Runtime System is not something that could be called elegant, consisting of 50,000 lines of C and C-- (a C-like language) code that does a lot of managerial things to execute compiled Haskell programs. The RTS is responsible for managing exceptions, implementing GHC's primitive functions (those suffixed with a magic hash), and scheduling light-weight threads. Memory management, profiling facilities, and STM are all implemented in RTS, and more.

How is this relevant to a Haskell programmer? Knowing the scope and limitations of the RTS is one thing. Also, the RTS isn't so much a black box; it can provide useful feedback about running programs, such as memory usage, garbage-collection statistics, profiling information, and so forth. Many aspects of the RTS are configurable via flags, whose optimization is necessary to max out performance. Different applications utilize the RTS in wildly different ways.

Runtime System flags are set at program startup:

./program...