[Haskell-cafe] Re: speed: ghc vs gcc

[Thomas Davie]

On 21 Feb 2009, at 00:10, Ahn, Ki Yung wrote:

> Thomas Davie wrote:
>> You need look no further than the debian language shootout that  
>> things really aren't as bad as you're making out – Haskell comes in  
>> in general less than 3x slower than gcc compiled C.
>> Of note, of all the managed languages, this is about the fastest –  
>> none of the other languages that offer safety and garbage  
>> collection etc get as close as Haskell does.
>> Bob
>
> OCaml and Clean seems to be pretty fast too.

Very true :).  As does C#, but using MS's compiler not mono.  I think  
my conclusion from this thread is "stop arguing, someone being wrong  
on the internet is not worth it", oh and "cool, new possibly major  
optimisation for ghc".

And finally, something I'd known all along – Haskell is plenty fast  
enough for writing real world programs, it's not as fast as C, but I  
don't care – I write so much better code so much faster in it that the  
tradeoff becomes worth it.

Sorry for getting into the slagging match so much, and count me out of  
this one from now on.

Bob