[Haskell-cafe] Why can't Haskell be faster?

[Paulo J. Matos]

Hello all,

I, along with some friends, have been looking to Haskell lately. I'm
very happy with Haskell as a language, however, a friend sent me the
link:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/

which enables you compare several language implementations. Haskell
seems to lag behind of Clean.
>From what I've seen of Clean it seems almost like Haskell. It even
distributes a Haskell->Clean translator so the obvious question is,
why is Haskell slower?
Being similar languages and being GHC a very good compiler, can't it
get at least as fast as Clean?

What am I missing here? (I wrote this mail assuming the results from
the URL are trustworthy).

Cheers,

-- 
Paulo Jorge Matos - pocm at soton.ac.uk
http://www.personal.soton.ac.uk/pocm
PhD Student @ ECS
University of Southampton, UK