I've been following the topic in both threads. Very nice discussion.
On 18 May 2012 18:51, Isaac Gouy
Moreover, being absolutely sure that the algorithms are in some sense "identical" might make comparison pointless - for example, when the same assembly is generated by gcc from a C program and gnat from an Ada program.
Suppose we take the most efficient algorithm, in terms of time and space. The demonstrations given before this post indicate the language can be more important than the algorithm. There are two different takes on the situation. On one hand we have time and space. On the other, man-hours and reliability. Both languages deal with this ratio.
But we're still going to ask - Will my program be faster if I write it in language X? - and we're still going to wish for a simpler answer than - It depends how you write it!
Change that question to: Will my language be faster if I write program X? Good C++ implementations are easy to find. However, everything is exposed. De-bugging is taken for granted. Unless everyone in a team follows some strict practice, productivity may be at risk. It is more difficult to provide reliability (i.e. programs as proofs [1]). It is everywhere - that only increases probability to find more optimized algorithms in C++ libraries. The Haskell implementation enforces an interface to the programmer (the low level time-space management, i.e. GC, IO monads, parallelism). Improvements in implementation increase efficiency of the program (i.e. optimization in standard libraries [2]). Risk of damaging productivity is low. Taking that you could derive one efficient algorithm down to assembly, the fastest language is a matter of implementation. Then, in equal grounds, it's rather easy choice. -- [1] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/frege/frege.pdf [2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/haskell-cafe/KIxGd4babKE/J7LV3EGtutsJ