[Haskell-cafe] Re: OCaml list sees abysmal Language Shootout results

[Andre Pang]

On 29/09/2004, at 8:41 AM, Graham Klyne wrote:

> I can see that this requires the original file to be kept for 3-time 
> scanning,  so enough memory for the entire file will be required.  Is 
> that *the* problem to which you allude?  I can't see any other problem 
> here.  And why would this put Haskell at a disadvantage?

I've been watching this thread with interest, and posted my own 
thoughts on this thread and Haskell's performance in general as a blog 
entry.  Rather than repeat it all here, I'll post a link to it:

   http://www.algorithm.com.au/mt/haskell/haskells_performance.html

The executive summary of my thoughts is that it seems to be entirely 
possible to optimise Haskell to be competitive with other, more 
performance-focused languages, but it's hard, and you have to be a 
Haskell expert to do so.  One possible solution may be to allow for 
some extra, syntactically integrated declarations to be inserted by the 
programmer which enables much better optimisation (e.g. see how to 
write unboxed strict array example in Clean: much more clear and less 
work than using IOUArrays).  Performance is the one major reason I 
recommend many existing C programmers try out O'Caml rather than 
Haskell as their first functional programming language, and it would be 
really nice if optimisation was made a bit easier.


-- 
% Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save