[Haskell-cafe] Can't Haskell catch up with Clean's uniqueness typing?

[haskell-cafe.mail.zooloo at xoxy.net]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tomasz Zielonka - tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com"
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 9:18 PM


>
> We can get similar performance from Haskell using various features of
> GHC (unboxed arrays, mutable arrays, ST monad, soon SMP, etc) and one
> can argue that they are even nicer.
>
> I liked the concept of UT in Clean, but I haven't ever got comfortable
> with using it to write real programs.
>


Clean-like _explicit_ uniqueness typing is not what I'm asking for in Haskell.

>
> I think the biggest obstacle is that almost nobody asks for it.
> Well, you asked, but how much Haskell code did you write to be
> sure that you really need it?
>


Indeed, my own experience is too limited to really compare. However, the latest ghc survey,

http://haskell.org/ghc/survey2005-summary.html

suggests that "Performance of compiled code" is a top issue to others, too. OC, this involves various aspects, with memory
usage being only one of them.


It might be possible to get extremely fast code out of ghc, but as an overall impression, it's not easy, whilst Clean sort
of gives it for granted (well, struggeling with wrongly assigned uniqueness attributes aside).


In the debian shootout,

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ghc&lang2=clean,

programs generated by ghc generally need multiples of time and space of the Clean version, even though the latter is, in
many cases, a nearly literal translation from Haskell.

I know, all this is not representative. Anyway, it may serve as motivation for my question (or suggestion).


Regards,

zooloo



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