An EDSL approach to high performance haskell programming
Journal article, 2013

This paper argues for a new methodology for writing high performance Haskell programs by using Embedded Domain Specific Languages. We exemplify the methodology by describing a complete library, meta-repa, which is a reimplementation of parts of the repa library. The paper describes the implementation of meta-repa and contrasts it with the standard approach to writing high performance libraries. We conclude that even though the embedded language approach has an initial cost of defining the language and some syntactic overhead it gives a more tailored programming model, stronger performance guarantees, better control over optimizations, simpler implementation of fusion and inlining and allows for moving type level programming down to value level programming in some cases. We also provide benchmarks showing that meta-repa is as fast, or faster, than repa. Furthermore, meta-repa also includes push arrays and we demonstrate their usefulness for writing certain high performance kernels such as FFT.

Array programming

EDSL

Optimization

Meta programming

Author

Johan Ankner

Student at Chalmers

Josef Svenningsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

SIGPLAN Notices (ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages)

07308566 (ISSN)

Vol. 48 12 1-11

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1145/2503778.2503789

More information

Latest update

10/17/2022