[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Speed

[Einar Karttunen]

On 23.12 19:14, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> I'm taking a look at the "Computer Language Shootout Benchmarks".
> 
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
> 
> It looks like Haskell doesn't do very well. It seems to be near the 
> bottom of the pile in most tests. Is this due to the inherent design of 
> Haskell or is it merely the fact that GHC is young and hasn't had as 
> much time to optimize as other compilers?

Some reasons for this include:

* Efficient string handling functions are packaged separately (faststring etc)
  And thus not included in shootout.
* The tests change faster than Haskell people write efficient versions
  of the programs.
* Most of the Haskell results are taking an imperative implementation
  and just translating it.
* In many cases other languages use arrays while the Haskell implementation
  uses lists. Haskell does have efficient arrays.


- Einar Karttunen