[Haskell-cafe] Re: OCaml list sees abysmal Language Shootout results

[Brian Smith]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:16:36 -0700, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> wrote:
> n Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 12:22:13PM +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> > So is it fair to compare the default lazy Haskell solution with all
> > the eager solutions out there that laboriously do all this unnecessary
> > work?  Apparently not, so we have gone to all kinds of trouble to slow
> > the Haskell solution down, make it over-strict, do the work N times,
> > and thereby have a "fair" performance test.  Huh.
> 
> I think the naive way is perfectly fair. If haskell has to live with
> the disadvantages of lazy evaluation, it only makes sense we should be
> able to take advantage of the advantages. The fact that haskell doesn't
> have to compute those intermediate values is a real advantage which
> should be reflected in the results IMHO.
>        John

This seems especially true if you have to add extra lines of code to
make the tests "fair," because this extra code counts against Haskell
in the lines-of-code metric. Personally, I am more impressed by the
lines-of-code metrics than I am by the performance metrics.

- Brian