[Haskell-cafe] Haskell performance question

[Dan Piponi]

Mikhail,

> main = do
>   print $ foldl' (+) 0 $ take 100000000 [1.0,1.0..]
>
> works 10 times faster than your C version. You just need to adapt to the
> radically different style of programming.

My wasn't intended to represent the problem that I'm trying to solve,
but the approach I want to take. The problems that I do want to solve
don't lend themselves to this kind of approach.

My real situation is that I want to write code that has both a
high-level component and a low-level number-crunching component that
works on large dense and sparse arrays. Idiomatic Haskell is great for
the high-level component. But the question is whether or not its worth
trying to write the low-level code in Haskell or whether I should just
write that code in C and use the FFI. There are still advantages to
using Haskell even if the code is highly unidiomatic: you have the
freedom of throwing in higher order functions from time to time in the
low-level code, and writing mixed-language code is a pain.
--
Dan