Haskell performance

[Sébastien Pierre]

Hi again,

Well, it seems like my little question raised an interesting thread, and 
brought me some valuable information.
I am pleased to see that the Haskell community is particularily aware of 
the fact that being a fast language is far from being the most important 
criterium in most languages choice.

Still, the application I am working on has major performance 
constraints, which if unmet may result in the project to be stopped. I 
also have to convince both clients and managers of the adequation of my 
choice regarding these constraints, and I must say that I would already 
have trouble to introduce something different than C or C++ (they are 
rather oldschool corporate people ;).

For now, I assume that Haskell is very expressive, but has the speed of 
most interpreted language, which makes it an average choice for my 
application. However, I think that Haskell laziness could be of great 
value : I will have most of the application data stored in a database, 
so I could gain a lot of time in only loading what is useful for a 
processing. So I guess that everything lies in how I easily (and 
efficiently) I can mix C++ and Haskell.

Thanks to all who answered :)

 -- Sébastien