On Nov 12, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Hi guys.
I just removed GHC 6.6.1 and installed 6.8.1, and I noticed
something rather unexpected. I recompiled an existing program (with
-O2), and instead of taking 30 seconds to compile, it took roughly
2 seconds. That's a really serious speedup! o_O Anybody have any
idea what might have caused this? (Not, you understand, that I'm
complaining! But the release notes say 10-15% faster, not 15,000%
faster...)
One of the main reasons for this is that GHC no longer defaults to
compiling via C when -O2 is enabled. In 6.6.1, it would generate C
code and then run the C compiler on that, by default. Now, by
default, it just generates assembly code directly.
Both C and assembly generation are available in both versions (using
the -fvia-C and -fasm flags, respectively) but 6.8.1 improved the
assembly backend enough that it made sense to make it the default.
Aaron
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