[Haskell-cafe] Speed comparison?

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Daniel Carrera <dcarrera at digitaldistribution.com> writes:

> My next question is about speed. How fast would you consider Haskell?
> (say, for computational work). How would you compare it to C, Python
> and Ruby?
>
> I suggest C, Python and Ruby as a basis of comparison because:

I suggest adding OCaml, because it's similar to Haskell, and because
OCaml has a good implementation while Python and Ruby have only slow
implementations, and thus being faster than them is not impressive.

The OCaml compiler usually generates faster code than GHC, sometimes
slower.

> Furthermore, the Haskell page says that ghc produces fast programs.
> So I would guess that Haskell is faster than Python, but not as fast
> as C.
>
> Would that be correct?

Usually yes.

(Python is fast when most of the work is done by libraries written in C.
C is slow when dynamic memory allocation or threads are involved.)

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/