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

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 01:41:03PM +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:
> >With code like this, I'm not surprised!
> >
> >    main = do file <- getContents
> >              putStrLn $ show (length $ lines file) ++ " " ++
> >                         show (length $ words file) ++ " " ++
> >                         show (length file)
> >
> >Space-leak or what?
> 
> Er, please excuse a dumb question, but I'm struggling to see the problem 
> here.
> 
> 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.

It would be nice if these scans were performed concurrently in a way
that would make memory usage constant, wouldn't it? ;)

Hmmm... maybe some simple tracking of garbage collection results would
suffice... Reschedule if the current thread doesn't help in collecting
garbage... But I am dreaming now... :)

> 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?

The only problem is that some people may draw incorrect conclusions.
Should we care? I already submitted two improvements for shootout in
the last two days (not included yet), but I don't know if it's worth
the effort.

I remember SPJ's motto: ,,Avoid success at all cost''. Is this motto
still valid?

    http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/papers/haskell-retrospective/HaskellRetrospective-2.pdf

Best regards,
Tom

-- 
.signature: Too many levels of symbolic links