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

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Fawzi,

Monday, February 26, 2007, 3:44:09 PM, you wrote:

> I am new to haskell, but I find your assertions surprising, given  
> that from my experience the really performance critical code is  
> little, and the reset can be even interpreted.
> As far as I know C/C++ or similar are not really that advanced with  
> respect to whole program optimization (not much more than inlining).

yes, Haskell provides better opportunities of higher-level program
optimizations and i guess that ghc better in this aspect than
traditional C compilers. but C programmers just make such sort of
optimizations manually. on the side of lower-level optimizations i
guess that only jhc currently can compete with C compilers - only for
low-level optimized Haskell code (that is harder to write that
low-level optimized C code) and only because jhc generates C itself as
intermediate code

> I had the impression that haskell, until the shootout push, was not  
> good at optimizing/had not optimized libraries for some common  
> computational kernels, but now is in a much better shape (for ghc),  
> and with Don is doing, hopefully it will stay so.

naive youth :)  first, most of shootout entries depend on libraries
speed (multithreading, regexps), not speed of code generated by the
compiler. second, ghc was not changed much, but programs was rewritten
in the non-idiomatic way. you can find ideas of such rewriting in
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/fusion.pdf
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/afp-arrays.ps.gz


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com