[Haskell-cafe] faster factorial function via FFI?

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Dan Weston wrote:
> A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Simple, fast, elegant.

>> factorial :: Integer -> Integer
>> factorial = product . zipWith (^) . factorisedFactorial

Well... The zipWith (^) should be map (uncurry (^)).

And the performance of this approach is strongly dependent on the 
efficiency of your prime sieve, so you're moving the complexity around, 
not eliminating it.

The binary splitting method doesn't need a source of primes, and 
performs half decently on numbers such as fact 1e6 (5.5 million digits 
computed in about 5 seconds).

	<b