The NoFib benchmark suite

• The imaginary part consists of toy programs such as nqueens and Ackermann's function. Such programs are useless for drawing general conclusions, but can sometimes show up nasty performance bugs in sharp relief.

• The spectral part consists of kernels of real programs, such as Fast Fourier Transform. Again, one should be careful about drawing any general conclusions from these programs, but they are a whole lot more realistic than the imaginary suite whilst still being of modest size.

• The real part consists of real application programs, written by people who simply wanted to get the job done. They are larger and more I/O intensive than the imaginary and spectral suite.

The NoFib suite and the ideas behind it is presented in more detail in the following paper:

• The nofib Benchmark Suite of Haskell Programs - Will Partain
  PostScript(gzip'ed)

  In Functional Programming, Glasgow 1992,
  J Launchbury and PM Sansom, eds.,
  Workshops in Computing, Springer Verlag, 195-202.

We are very keen indeed to expand the range of the NoFib suite. If you have a Haskell application program, please send it to us (along with suitable test data) to include!

July 1997: You can get two variants of the NoFib programs from our FTP site; one is the old Haskell 1.2 programs (to match the GHC 0.29 release), the other is for Haskell-1.4 programs (matching the GHC-2.05 release).