I think that a higuer level language has better opportunities to optimize, specially if the compiler is coded in its own language. for example I guess that a good type dependent implementation would evaluate the sum[1..10^9::Int] at compilation time.
I reality haskell is much much faster than c in some cases that now are not considered, but it is fair to remember that haskell outperfromed all the rest in those old benchmarks with didīt care to print the results. This may seem trivial now, but at the time surprised the benchmark people.
2009/2/21 Khudyakov Alexey
<alexey.skladnoy@gmail.com>
On Friday 20 February 2009 16:29:29 Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello haskell-cafe,
>
> since there are no objective tests comparing ghc to gcc, i made my own
> one. these are 3 programs, calculating sum in c++ and haskell:
>
> main = print $ sum[1..10^9::Int]
>
> ... skipped ...
The discussion is mostly about low level optimizations such as loop unrolling
etc.
I have another question. Why shouldn't compiler realize that `sum [1..10^9]'
is constant and thus evaluate it at compile time?
--
Khudakov Alexey