On 05/11/2012 07:53 AM, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote:
My point is: If you need C-like performance at a certain spot there is really no excuse for writing the entire application in C. Haskell has a working, powerful enough FFI. Also idiomatic Haskell code nowadays performs close to C. If your code doesn't, chances are that it's not even idiomatic. Sorting a list is easy and beautiful in code. But it's far from idiomatic. Using ST with destructive update is also not idiomatic. One of my performance masterpieces is the "instinct" AI library (see Hackage). It uses only immutable vectors and performs very heavy Double calculations, yet performs better than the same code with mutable arrays did. With a few years of Haskell experience in my backpack I know how to utilize laziness to get amazing performance for code that most people would feel must be written with destructively updating loop. And the resulting code is just beautiful to read and watch at work, a great demonstration of the wonders the GHC developers have created. Hello Ertugrul,
Out of the curios, did you compare the performance of Instinct with implementations in languages, associated with numerical computations, like Octave?