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I think you mean stream fusion. While cool, it doesn't actually work in real cases yet. Indeed the ticket to implement it has been closed as invalid because it needs more research.

http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/915

It's still one of the most impressive moves to a sufficiently smart compiler.

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Ummmm. False. No compiler support is needed for Stream fusion. Stream fusion is used in the follow widely used Haskell libraries: Vector, Text, and ByteString. In fact, for any fixed k, I can manufacture natural look Haskell code in these libraries that would be roughly k times slower sans stream fusion.

The different fusion strategies have different trade offs, so it could also be that I'm not reading your with the correct nuance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising what it _can_ do. It's just that the really exciting idea is the SSC idea: where you can just write clean code and have the compiler work out the best execution strategy.

At the moment, SF seems to support natural looking code, but not always truly natural code. It's tantalisingly close, but it doesn't seem to be getting any closer.

could you unpack your remarks in a bit more detail?

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