A dummy project to emulate the perf issue I am facing. I've written an equivalent perl program for comparison. Looks like the perl program runs over 50 times faster! Clearly I am missing something.
kashyaps-mbp:haskell-perf-repro kashyapck$ make
Building...
[1 of 1] Compiling Main ( driver.hs, driver.o )
Linking driver ...
Done
kashyaps-mbp:haskell-perf-repro kashyapck$ time ./driver > /dev/null
real 0m6.142s
user 0m5.824s
sys 0m0.313s
kashyaps-mbp:haskell-perf-repro kashyapck$ time ./driver.pl > /dev/null
real 0m0.145s
user 0m0.054s
sys 0m0.090s