Update: This post (and the bug report Joachim Breitner submitted in succession) resulted in the change of the haskell documentation: The statement “At the moment, -O2 is unlikely to produce better code than” was removed from the documentation two months after this post. A denser and cleaner representation of the data and the main arguments is given in my bachelor thesis (written in german) that I finished around the same time.

TL;DR: There’s no significant difference between the GHC versions 7.* and 8.0.1-alpha regarding the Haskell code used in the benchmarking game. And there might be an improvement of the performance of idiomatic Haskell code from GHC 7.0.1 to GHC 8.0.1-alpha.

I’m currently building a new benchmarking tool called temci as part of my bachelor thesis.

In search for good programs to benchmark for the evaluation part, I stumbled across the benchmarking game. This blog posts is about using parts of the benchmarking game and temci to measure and compare the performance of the following GHC versions: 7.0.1, 7.2.1, 7.4.1, 7.6.1, 7.8.1, 7.10.1 and 8.0.0 (the version from mid January, called 8.0.1 here for brevity) using different optimization levels (“-O”, “-O2” and “-Odph”, see: Haskell documentation) . Continue reading →