maximumBy has a space leak

Given the program:

import Data.List
main = print $ maximumBy compare [1..10000]

Compiling with -O2, on GHC 7.8.3 this runs in constant stack space (works fine with +RTS -K1K). With GHC 7.10.2 I get:

$ ghc --make Test.hs -O2 -rtsopts
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Test.hs, Test.o )
Linking Test.exe ...

$ Test +RTS -K100K
Stack space overflow: current size 33680 bytes.
Use `+RTS -Ksize -RTS' to increase it.

Not sure why it's failing at 33K instead of 100K, but it's certainly taking more than 1K as GHC 7.8.3 did.

See #3416 (closed) for previous discussion of this issue. My guess is that in older versions of GHC the strictness analysis managed to kick in and optimise things. With the burnt bridges that no longer works.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	7.10.2
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	libraries/base
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system	Windows
Architecture