[ionfish]

No, the default backend is the native code generator. You need to use the -fllvm flag to enable the LLVM backend.

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.6.1/html/users_guide/code-...

"[The LLVM backend] is an alternative backend that uses the LLVM compiler to produce executable code. It generally produces code as with performance as good as the native code generator but for some cases can produce much faster code. This is especially true for numeric, array heavy code using packages like vector. The penalty is a significant increase in compilation times."