[Haskell] [Fwd: Re: Computer Language Shootout]

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 03:43:08AM +0100, Andrzej Jaworski wrote:
> It sounds reasonable. However knowledge of how program performs in
> micro-steps does not add up, so the benchmarks may wet up appetite for lunch
> that does not come. I have pointed into such example - an astonishing and
> unexplained underperformance of Haskell with all the profiling information
> at hand.
> 
> I guess Haskell compilers are not particularly good at detecting specific
> properties of a program and hence with optimizing it. This however shows up
> with size so Donald's benchmarks cannot catch that out.
> 
> For this reason, undiagnosed and untreated, Haskell has been abandoned for
> example in Algebraic Dynamic Programming, in spite of its unparallel
> expressive power and a lot of hope. In ILP/IFP and GP it failed too.

C, thirty years ago: (disclaimer, I'm 16)
 * Very much slower than assembly
 * Very much easier to use than assembly
 * Very easy to interface with assembly

So everyone used C with assembler inner loops, no big deal.

Haskell, now:
 * Very much slower than C
 * Very much easier to use than C
 * Very easy to interface with C

So I think we should do the same.  It even shows in the Shootout - the
programs that are simultaneously fastest and clearest are not pure
Haskell, but delegate their innermost loops to tuned C libraries (FPS
and GMP). 

Stefan