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

[Keith Wansbrough]

I just saw this on the OCaml list (in a posting by "Rafael 'Dido' 
Sevilla" <dido at imperium.ph> in the "Observations on OCaml vs. Haskell" 
thread).  I can't believe that a simple "wc" implementation should be 
570 times slower in Haskell than OCaml - could someone investigate and 
fix the test?

--KW 8-)

http://caml.inria.fr/archives/200409/msg00485.html

> > 2. Haskell strings are lists of characters
> > 
> > It's annoying that strings aren't normally processed this way in OCaml, 
> > and even more annoying that (^) or (::) cannot be used in pattern 
> > matching over strings.  I like Haskell's approach.  The list 
> > concatenation operator is the same as the string concatenation operator 
> > in Haskell.
> > 
> 
> This is something of an efficiency/elegance tradeoff.  Making strings
> act like lists means potentially boxing *every character in the string*.
> In other words, it's potentially a very expensive way of doing business.
> Paul Graham was mulling over this kind of tradeoff in his design of Arc,
> as I recall.  Another language that does this type of thing is Erlang,
> and both languages seem to be significantly slower than OCaml in string
> handling, at least as far as this site goes:
> 
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
> 
> For the word count benchmark OCaml scores 0.1850 seconds, while GHC is a
> dismal last place at 105.2110 seconds!  Even the bytecode ocaml is an
> order of magnitude faster.  The word frequency benchmark also shows this
> kind of poor string handling performance for Haskell, with OCaml scoring
> 0.5669 seconds, while GHC scores a truly dismal 6.4540, more than an
> order of magnitude slower, and even the bytecode ocaml is faster at
> 4.2644 seconds.
> 
> All in all, it would appear that Haskell's approach has been expensive
> in terms of performance, if the benchmarks are to be taken at face
> value.  Such are the tradeoffs language designers have to make.