[Haskell-beginners] Re: Haskell vs Clean (speed)

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Tue, 19 May 2009 08:02:42 +0200, Daniel Carrera
<daniel.carrera at theingots.org> wrote:

>Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
>> Incidentally, why can't you also subscribe to Haskell-Cafe?
>
>Eventually I found that somehow I couldn't get any emails at all from 
>the Haskell server, but the problem magically fixed itself after several 
>hours, so I did subscribe to haskell-cafe and there was a short thread 
>about Haskell vs Clean. The message I got out of it is that it is very 
>difficult to draw any conclusions from the Debian benchmark because 
>there are more Haskell people willing to optimize the Haskell code.

Yes, I just read that thread ("[Haskell-cafe] Haskell vs Clean (speed
comparison)" at
http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/msg58988.html).

Based on the discussions there, there seem to be two problems with
this benchmark.  In reference to Bulat Ziganshin's comments in that
thread, 

On Sun, 3 May 2009 22:42:21 +0400, Bulat Ziganshin
<bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hello Daniel,
>
>Sunday, May 3, 2009, 10:24:52 PM, you wrote:
>
>> 32-bit sing core [1]: Lisp, Fortran
>
>:)  this test measures speed of some programs, not "languages".
>results are depends mainly on bundled libraries and RTS. by no means
>it demonstrates speed of compiler-generated code of carefully-written
>program what is typically considered as "language speed". the reasons
>are:
>
>1) C++ people (and probably Fortran too) aren't so interested in
>making fastest possible programs as Haskell community. it becomes
>popular a few years ago, you can find that Haskell becomes several
>faster at average since then, which doesn't reflect actual
>improvements in GHC code generation (10-20%)

What is the reason for this phenomenon, though?  If participants don't
optimize their programs, then what is the use of the benchmark?

>2) Most programs there depend on speed of libraries. Moreover, there
>is limitation that it should be *bundled* libraries, so results
>greatly depends on what currently included in one compiler or another

Is there a specific reason that the libraries need to be bundled?

>3) it's prohibited to write your own fast code if bundled library is
>too slow (for example, because it's too general)

Again, this seems to give an advantage to programming languages with a
preponderance of optimized bundled libraries.

Based on the above arguments, it seems as if this benchmark does not
really compare programming languages; rather, it seems to compare
combinations of programming languages and their bundled libraries and
communities.  But then what happens if you have a great programming
language with few optimized libraries and a small and relatively
inactive community?

-- Benjamin L. Russell
-- 
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