The nofib Benchmark Suite of Haskell Programs

This position paper describes the need for, make-up of, and "rules of the game" for a benchmark suite of Haskell programs. (It does not include results from running the suite.) Those of us working on the Glasgow Haskell compiler hope this suite will encourage sound, quantitative assessment of lazy functional programming systems. This version of this paper reflects the state of play at the initial pre-release of the suite. 1 Towards lazy functional benchmarking 1.1 History of benchmarking---functional The quantitative measurement of systems for lazy functional programming is a near-scandalous subject. Dancing behind a thin veil of disclaimers, researchers in the field can still be found quoting "nfibs/sec" (or something equally egregious) , as if this refers to anything remotely interesting. The April, 1989, Computer Journal special issue on lazy functional programming is a not-too-dated self-portrait of the community that promotes computing in this way. It is one that non-specialists..

Measuring the Effectiveness of a Simple Strictness Analyser

We describe a simple strictness analyser for purely-functional programs, show how its results are used to improve programs, and provide measurements of the effects of these improvements. These measurements are given both in terms of overall run-time, and in terms of internal operations such as allocations, updates, etc. Despite its simplicity, the analyser handles higher-order functions, and non-flat domains provided they are non-recursive. Ths paper appears in Functional Programming, Glasgow 1993, ed Hammond and O'Donnell, Springer Workshops in Computer Science, 1993, pp201-220. 1 Introduction A lot has been written about strictness analysis for non-strict functional programs, usually in the hope that the results of the analysis can be used to reduce run-time. On the other hand, few papers present measurements of how well it works in practice. Usually, all that is presented are the run-times of a variety of (usually small) programs, with and without strictness analysis enabled (eg Sm..

Measuring the e ectiveness of a simple strictness analyser

Abstract We describe a simple strictness analyser for purely-functional programs, show how its results are used to improve programs, and provide measurements of the e ects of these improvements. These measurements are given both in terms of overall run-time, and in terms of internal operations such as allocations, updates, etc. Despite its simplicity, the analyser handles higher-order functions, and non-at domains provided they are non-recursive

The Glasgow Haskell compiler: a technical overview

We give an overview of the Glasgow Haskell compiler, focusing especially on way in which we have been able to exploit the rich theory of functional languages to give very practical improvements in the compiler. The compiler is portable, modular, generates good code, and is freely available

Final report on the GRASP project

This is the final report on the GRASP project, carried out under SERC grants GR/F34671 and GR/F98444, at Glasgow University 1 2 . The project supported two Principal Investigators (Simon Peyton Jones and Phil Wadler), and three Research Assistants (Kevin Hammond, Cordelia Hall and Will Partain). Four research students have worked in close association with the project. 1 Summary The purpose of GRASP was to help get the technology of functional programming out of the lab and into the hands of practitioners, by producing robust and usable compilers and profilers for these languages, on both sequential and parallel systems. The main achievements of the project are as follows: ffl We have played a key role in the development of a common international non-strict functional language, Haskell (Hudak et al. [1992]). This standardisation effort has led directly to a considerable focussing of the international research community in these languages. More details about Haskell are given in Sect..