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

[Paulo J. Matos]

On 31/10/2007, Peter Hercek <peter at syncad.com> wrote:
> Add to that better unbox / box annotations, this may make even
>   bigger difference than the strictness stuff because it allows
>   you to avoid a lot of indirect references do data.
>
> Anyway, if Haskell would do some kind of whole program analyzes
>   and transformations it probably can mitigate all the problems
>   to a certain degree.
>

So, I might assert that it is not a problem of the Haskell language
itself, it is a problem with the compiler. Which means that with
enough effort it would be possible for the compiler to generate
compiled code with performance as good as Clean.

> So the slowness of Haskell (compared to Clean) is consequence of
>   its type system. OK, I'll stop, I did not write Clean nor Haskell
>   optimizers or stuff like that :-D
>

type system? Why is that? Shouldn't type system in fact speed up the
generated code, since it will know all types at compile time?

> Peter.
>
> Peter Hercek wrote:
> > I'm curious what experts think too.
> >
> > So far I just guess it is because of clean type system getting
> >  better hints for optimizations:
> >
> > * it is easy to mark stuff strict (even in function signatures
> >  etc), so it is possible to save on unnecessary CAF creations
> >
> > * uniqueness types allow to do in-place modifications (instead
> >  of creating a copy of an object on heap and modifying the copy),
> >  so you save GC time and also improve cache hit performance
> >
> > Peter.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
>
>


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