[Haskell-cafe] What's the deal with Clean?

[Don Stewart]

stephen.tetley:
> 2009/11/3 Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>:
> 
> >
> > As far as I can tell, Clean is to Haskell as C is to Pascal. I.e., Clean is
> > notionally very similar to Haskell, but with lots of added clutter,
> > complexity and general ugliness - but it's probably somehow more
> > machine-efficient as a result.
> >
> > (All of which makes the name "Clean" rather ironic, IMHO.)
> 
> Clean used to be considered faster than Haskell, though I don't know
> what the situation is now:
> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-October/033854.html

We've come a long way in 5 years. Haskell is almost always faster  on
the shootout now. And parallelism goes a long way to helping there:

    http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ghc&lang2=clean&box=1

Though this is also true on a single core:

    http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ghc&lang2=clean&box=1  

It's just a lot closer. Clean continues to have a very small memory
footprint.

-- Don