[Haskell-cafe] Re: A suggestion for the next high profile Haskell project

ajb at spamcop.net ajb at spamcop.net
Fri Dec 22 20:01:02 EST 2006


G'day all.

Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> writes:

> of course, we can fool any topic by changing the names. no one will say
> that Haskell is small productive language, the topic was just about speed
> of code generated

Actually, the topic was "performance".

What "performance" means to a modern games programmer is different from
what it means to an operating system developer, and that's different
again to someone developing a telephone exchange or aircraft avionics.

What most people mean by "performance" is actually "throughput", which
is the amount of work which can be done by a system just prior to
overload.  In the hard real-time area, for example, what's often more
important is how gracefully overload is handled (ensuring that "hard" tasks
don't get starved in favour of "soft" tasks), or avoiding overload in the
first place.

In addition, "performance" often doesn't compare like with like.  The
"performance" (however that's defined) of a typical Haskell program
usually isn't compared with the performance of an _equivalent_ C program
(where "equivalence" means similar features, robustness and ability to
add new features while maintaining "performance").

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage


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