CAcarterschonwald·Oct 16, 2014
I write performance sensitive haskell all the time.
In fact my main focus the past 2 years has been designing better array computation tools (for dense and sparse matrix computation). (some of which i'm in the process of finally open sourcing)
I've tools and tricks that would drive humans mad before they could figure out how to port the full awesomeness of what i've done to C++. The main place where I'll use C in my haskell is for writing SIMD kernels or wrapping up some unrolled ASM from openblas/blis like this monstrosity https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/blob/develop/kernel/x86_6...
for throughput cpu/ram throughput bounded workloads that aren't allocation heavy, thats pretty much the only time I'll break out C, for wrapping up those crazy kernels that are tuned to a specific cpu microarchitecture.
I also know quite a few people who
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use haskell as a meta language for some domain specific EDSL they compile via using LLVM as a library, I know of people who've proprietary tool chains using modern GHC haskell for really really performance sensitive workloads in this fashion in high frequency trading, computer vision, and scientific computing. (and I've the fortune to consider them my friends)
btw, over on reddit, the amazing austin seipp (who does a LOT of work on GHC) has a super articulate post about performance engineering in haskell http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2jbl78/from_60_fram...
Anyways, at the end of the day, engineering is about building software that works in finite time. The performance bits will only bit in your inner most loop, and the ffi overhead in haskell for c that takes < 10µs should be about 2-5ns (when an ffi call takes less than ~ 10µs, its safe to use the "unsafe" ffi, for operations that may take > 10µs, you should always use the default/"safe" ffi convention or someone will come knocking at your door late at night quite angry).
I should also disclose I'm slowly working out a few crazy extensions to ghc for low level performance engineering, though those might not make it into GHC till 7.12 at the current rate things are going in my life :)
the one area where GHC doesn't shine is in mega core allocation heavy workloads, but i've yet to see anyone do well by default in that regime in any language! :)
EDIT: also, profile before doing performance engineering. And before that choose the right algorithms! :)
EDIT: to further elaborate on some of the tech i've got, I've a way of doing array computation that gives me a very nice blend of guaranteed good memory locality + extensibility that i've not seen in any other array computation tooling i've been able to lay my hands on, at least on this planet :)