Haskell performance

[Sébastien Pierre]

Hi !

ajb at spamcop.net wrote:

> I am still unsure of whether Haskell would be a good competitor against
>
>>other languages in my case, but it seems like if it does the best option
>>would be to reuse C++ graph libraries and carefully write a wrapper
>>around them to minimize passing values between C and Haskell worlds.
>>    
>>
>
>As a matter of curiosity, have you considered prototyping your program
>in Haskell first, and then subsequently translating it into C++?
>(Boost.Graph is supposed to be quite good, incidentally.)
>  
>
I actually considered to prototype the program in Python and then use 
Java when things get settled... the fact is that I don't know Haskell 
much (I never wrote a program with it) and try to avoid C++ when I can 
(too error-prone in my opinion). Most of the program will be made of 
algorithms that manipulate RDF graphs using the Redland RDF library (C 
based), and this library happens to have both Python and Java bindings.

>If Haskell provides more rapid development (and I think it does), then
>you can spend time in Haskell making your algorithms work, finding the
>"hot spots" and generally optimising it, then translating parts of it
>into C++ as needed.
>  
>
Johan "Mahogny" made a point when relating his problems with implenting 
complex algorithms in C and Haskell. I personnaly had a rather 
frustrating experience of implementing a Ford-Fulkerson graph operation 
with Java... the imperative style plus the OO paradigm did not put my in 
the appropriate perspective to properly implement this.

I truely think that functional languages are much more suitable for 
implementing complex graph algorithms than imperative languages, though 
I can't really explain why... (I may say that I consider 
functional/declarative programming good for expressing 
processing/behaviour and OO/imperative good for expressing data).

Cheers,

 -- Sébastien