Improve performance of numerical code

[paolo]

GHC's performance for double and float intensive code is not as good as it could be. Find out why and improve it. Requires GHC backend hacking. Must be very Haskell literate or have knowledge of code generators.

Interested Mentors

• Don Stewart <dons@…>
• Manuel Chakravarty <chak@…>

Interested Students

• Creighton Hogg <wchogg@…>

[dons]

Needs close discussion with SimonM about related issues (e.g. SSE support in the native code gen). Could be integrated into the general work on the code gen appearing in the next few months.

If you're interested in doing code generator hacking, this is the ticket, and we can discuss more with Simon about what to do.

[simonmar]

I think the timing isn't right for this project, as we have significant upheavals in the pipeline for the back end this summer, so coordination will be difficult. For a SoC project we need something with more clearly-defined goals, and less interaction with other ongoing development work.

An example of a good project would be "implement optimisation X in the backend" - but that won't be doable until we have the architectural changes in place. So I'm going to mark this as "bad" for now.

[dons]

Too old.