﻿﻿Thanks to work by Bryan O’Sullivan, there has been a rennaissance in performance benchmarking tools for Haskell, built upon Criterion.

Compared to most other benchmarking frameworks (for any programming language, not just Haskell), criterion focuses on being easy to use, informative, and robust.

The Galois Tech Talk of Feb 23rd presented this work. You can read the slides online, or find the source and examples here.

Criterion uses statistically robust mechanisms for sampling and computing sound microbenchmark results, and is more stable in the presence of noise on the system than naive timings.

Criterion has in turn spawned some extensions:

Progression: compare different criterion graphs

NoSlow: a new array benchmark suite based on Criterion

In this talk I will present these tools, how to use them, and how to make your performance benchmarks in Haskell, or languages Haskell can talk to, more reliable. In addition, we’ll explore benchmarks using the new vector package, and GHC’s llvm backend.