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

[Gaius Hammond]

On 6 Nov 2009, at 17:19, Shawn Willden wrote:

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



To be fair, Python offloads its heavy lifting to C libraries - NumPy  
and SciPy run at very close to full C speed on large datasets. This is  
also how Matlab works. Unladen Swallow is an upcoming JIT compiler for  
Python.



Where Haskell shines for computation is when you can leverage lazy  
evaluation.



Cheers,



G