Hi
if you need maximum efficiency, drop all this high-level code and map md5.c to haskell as it was done in Don's blog
Wait... you're telling me to give up? To not even try??
He's saying use the resources the community have already provided, to write it in a lower-level style, following much the same pattern as Don did.
So all that bravado about Haskell enabling higher-level optimisations to produce a result faster than C is actually complete nonesense?
Nope. If you just code up a simple algorithm in C and in Haskell, it is pretty unlikely the Haskell one will go as fast as the C one. But Haskell (in particular GHC) does have powerful low-level features that means you can probably draw with C. One day, I hope that high-level Haskell will outperform C all the time. It's already true with some of the ByteString stuff, but hopefully one day it will be a normal result. It's pretty much the goal of this optimiser: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/supero/ Thanks Neil