[Haskell-cafe] Haskell performance in heavy numerical computations

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Joel,

Friday, July 7, 2006, 2:03:11 AM, you wrote:

> Is anyone using Haskell for heavy numerical computations? Could you  
> share your experience?

> My app will be mostly about running computations over huge amounts of
> stock data (time series)  so I'm thinking I might be better of with  
> OCaml.

are you sure that numerical speed will be critical for your app? may
be, for example, that speed of thread switching and passing data, or
ability to easily spread tasks between several cpu cores will be more
important?

numerical speed is poor in ghc 6.4, according to my tests. it's 10-20
times worse than of gcc. afair, the mandelbrot benchmark of Great
Language Shootout proves this - despite all optimization attempts,
GHC entry is still 5-10 times slower than gcc/ocaml/clean ones

i heard rumors that Roman Leshinsky works on improving this in 6.6,
though. try to ask GHC Team about his work

it's also possible that your computations can be run via existing
libraries or written by you in C and rest of program can be written in
Haskell. my own program uses architecture like this - it consists of
time-critical part - compression library written in C, and remaining part
written in Haskell


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com