[Haskell-cafe] In-place modification

[Derek Elkins]

On Mon, 2007-07-16 at 11:53 +0100, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> On 16/07/07, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello Sebastian,
> >
> > Sunday, July 15, 2007, 9:05:14 PM, you wrote:
> >
> > > As we've demonstrated there's nothing stopping you from writing
> > > imperative "C-like" algorithms in Haskell (just like C#), and there
> > > certainly wasn't any major performance difference
> >
> > as Donald mentioned, this test is just limited by cache speed, not by
> > speed of code generated.
> 
> But wouldn't you say that in general, if you spend the effort you can
> write low-level imperative algorithms in Haskell that perform
> reasonably well? Especially compared to e.g. C#? I think your own
> libraries demonstrate this!
> 
> I'm not saying it's as convenient (see the recent thread about "monad
> splices") to write low-level imperative code in Haskell, but using
> laziness in C# was hardly a walk on the beach either!
> So my point is that Haskell isn't geared towards low-level
> optimizations and performance, but in the few places where you do need
> it, you *can* get it (IMO for only moderately more inconvenience than
> you pay for *everything* in a low-level imperative language). Whereas
> C# is a bit the other way around (easy to modify state, inconvenient
> to write high-level/lazy/concurrent/etc. code), though something like
> C is even more the other way around.
> 

Ah, the secret of Haskell is to make low-level-looking code run slower
than high level code so that people write high-level code.