[Haskell-cafe] Can Haskell outperform C++?

[Janek S.]

Hi,

a couple of times I've encountered a statement that Haskell programs can have performance 
comparable to programs in C/C++. I've even read that thanks to functional nature of Haskell, 
compiler can reason and make guarantess about the code and use that knowledge to automatically 
parallelize the program without any explicit parallelizing commands in the code. I haven't seen 
any sort of evidence that would support such claims. Can anyone provide a code in Haskell that 
performs better in terms of execution speed than a well-written C/C++ program? Both Haskell and C 
programs should implement the same algorithm (merge sort in Haskell outperforming bubble sort in 
C doesn't count), though I guess that using Haskell-specific idioms and optimizations is of 
course allowed.

Jan