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

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 31/10/2007, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> goalieca:
> >    So in a few years time when GHC has matured we can expect performance to
> >    be on par with current Clean? So Clean is a good approximation to peak
> >    performance?
> >
>
> The current Clean compiler, for micro benchmarks, seems to be rather
> good, yes. Any slowdown wrt. the same program in Clean could be
> considered a bug in GHC...
>
> And remember usually Haskell is competing against 'high level' languages
> like python for adoption, where we're 5-500x faster anyway...

Not so sure about that last thing. I'd love to use Haskell for
performance, in other words use it because it makes it easier to write
parallel and concurrent programs (NDP and STM mainly, though I
wouldn't mind some language support for message passing, and perhaps
Sing#-style static protocol specifications, with some high degree of
inference).

Anyway, in order for that to be reasonable I think it's important that
even the sequential code (where actual data dependencies enforce
evaluation sequence) runs very quickly, otherwise we'll lose out to
some C-based language (written with 10x the effort) again when we
start bumping into the wall of Almdahls law...


-- 
Sebastian Sylvan
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