Comparing Time Performance of Haskell

Speaker: Martin Handley.
Two fundamental goals in programming are correctness (producing the right results) and efficiency (using as few resources as possible). In recent years, property-based testing has become a popular method for checking correctness, whereby conjectures about a program are expressed as executable specifications known as properties. To give high assurance that properties hold in general, they are tested on a large number of inputs which are generated automatically. This approach was popularised by QuickCheck, a lightweight tool that aids Haskell programmers in formulating and testing properties of their programs.

Can we adopt a similar strategy to check program efficiency?

In this talk, I introduce and demonstrate the AutoBench system: a lightweight, fully automatic means to compare the time performance of Haskell programs, designed in the spirit of QuickCheck.