The performance of the Haskell containers package

Abstract

In this paper, we perform a thorough performance analysis of the containers package, the de facto standard Haskell containers library, comparing it to the most of existing alternatives on HackageDB. We then significantly improve its performance, making it comparable to the best implementations available. Additionally, we describe a new persistent data structure based on hashing, which offers the best performance out of available data structures containing Strings and ByteStrings.