The recent release of a new backend for GHC that can generate code for LLVM is quite exciting.  Even more interesting is this blog post by Don Stewart (co-author of Real World Haskell) exploring genetic algorithms (via the Acovea toolkit) to select sets of LLVM compiler optimizations.  The process isn’t fast (Acovea chews on the options for four hours), but the improvements for even these preliminary explorations are striking.  This approach is worth watching; there is a lot of performance waiting to be squeezed out of modern processors, and it’s even better if we can design approaches that allows automatic optimization for each platform. (Don suggests that he’s working on a wrapper library to allow you to simply issue a main = evolve main' and let it go.)