On Nov 5, 2009, at 1:49 AM, David Virebayre wrote:
I think that's in a way what's Bulat is saying : for Haskell to really compete with C in *his view*, if I understand it, the compiler has to be able to take idiomatic Haskell code, and translate it in idomatic C code or better.
Or said another way, we have to be able to write things like SDL, jpeg or mpeg processing in Haskell, instead of writing bindings to C libraries, without losing on performance.
And this is confusing to those of us who are not compiler experts. Haskell knows when I have a list of Doubles, you know, because it's strongly typed. Then it proceeds to box them. Huh ? The laziness thing has many example od _reducing_ efficiency, but there seems to be a real lack of example where it helps. In fact it seems to _always_ hurt. People sure seem excited about it. Me, not so excited. I've asked this question before and the answer, apparently, is polymorphism. Maybe I'm oversimplifying :-) Maybe the folks at MLTON will add type classes to ML ;-) Brian