Re: [Haskell-cafe] Can Haskell outperform C++?

Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 06:54:08 -0400 From: wren ng thornton Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Can Haskell outperform C++? To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Message-ID: <4FB38750.9060009@freegeek.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

But on the other hand, there are quite a lot of people who focus excessively on "optimization" when the actual differences for the code they're writing are either negligible (e.g., because of I/O bottlenecks) or uninteresting (e.g., a 2x slowdown is a nuisance rather than a crisis).

It depends on what you use the code for. If I run an overnight report for the trading book of my bank in 16 hours, it is not acceptable and is a disaster. If I run it in 8h, it's OK-ish. In business settings, you often have strict deadlines and optimizing the code to be 2x faster can make a huge difference, as you change from missing the deadline to meeting a deadline. Regards, RW