[Haskell-beginners] Re: Is Haskell for me?

[Daniel Fischer]

Am Freitag 06 November 2009 18:19:50 schrieb Shawn Willden:
> On Friday 06 November 2009 09:52:48 am Cory Knapp wrote:
> > Idiomatic Haskell won't be as fast as idiomatic C++, but it will blow
> > Python away.
>
> Based on the little bit of stuff I've done, I think I'd characterize it
> this way:  C++ will be maybe twice as fast as Haskell.  Maybe a little
> more, maybe a little less, depending on a lot of details.

Difficult waters. Depending on a lot of things, (rather idiomatic) Haskell is between a 
little faster (that's rare, however) and *much* slower than C (or C++, but I can only 
strongly advise against using that; pick C, C# or Java if you want to use a fast, halfway 
sensible imperative language. C++ consistently chose what I find the worst parts of both 
worlds - YMMV).

Two things should be noted:
- it's easy, especially if one isn't yet experienced, to write Haskell code that is much 
slower than C because of the wrong choice of data structures or not making things strict 
in the right places.
- but if that happens, you have a good chance of quickly getting help to get up to speed 
here or on #haskell.

That said, a factor of 2-3 relative to C is usually achievable without low-level tweaking, 
sometimes better, sometimes worse.

> For heavy
> computation, Python will be a couple orders of magnitude slower than both.

For not very large values of 'couple': don't expect a factor of more than 100 - that's 
extremely rare.

>
> IOW, Haskell is slower than C++ but it's in the same ballpark.

Yes, as a general rule, that's it.
>
> Would anyone disagree?

Bulat?
>
> 	Shawn.