Hello. I have written 2 implementation of bubble sort algorithm in C and Haskell. Haskell implementation: module Main where main = do contents <- readFile "./data" print "Data loaded. Sorting.." let newcontents = bubblesort contents writeFile "./data_new_ghc" newcontents print "Sorting done" bubblesort list = sort list [] False rev = reverse -- separated. To see rev2 = reverse -- who calls the routine sort (x1:x2:xs) acc _ | x1 > x2 = sort (x1:xs) (x2:acc) True sort (x1:xs) acc flag = sort xs (x1:acc) flag sort [] acc True = sort (rev acc) [] False sort _ acc _ = rev2 acc I've compared these two implementations having run both on file with size of 20 KiB. C implementation took about a second, Haskell — about 1 min 10 sec. I have also profiled the Haskell application: Compile for profiling: C:\Temp> ghc -prof -auto-all -O --make Main Profile: C:\Temp> Main.exe +RTS -p and got these http://hpaste.org/fastcgi/hpaste.fcgi/view?id=24190#a24190 This is a pseudocode of the algorithm: procedure bubbleSort( A : list of sortable items ) defined as: do swapped := false for each i in 0 to length(A) - 2 inclusive do: if A[i] > A[i+1] then swap( A[i], A[i+1] ) swapped := true end if end for while swapped end procedure The performance may suffer from the memory allocation for the list. I wonder if it's possible to make Haskell implementation work faster without changing the algorithm (there's are actually a few tricks to make it work faster, but neither implementations have these optimizations). I'm interested not in particular algorithm performance but rather in performance of its implementations in various languages. I compiled the Haskell implementation in GHC (Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.2), which is the latest available from the site.