RE: can a lazy language give fast code?

Can one write withthe Haskell compliler faster code than in the examples of http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/ where GHC (old Haskell 98?) seems to be much slower than Ocaml or Mlton both strict functional languages. Can one expect any improvements in speed in the future?

Many of those programs can be written differently to improve performance. One issue that is affecting performance in several cases is the speed of character I/O, and the representation of Strings as lists of characters. Dramatic improvements can be had by using unboxed arrays of Char (Data.Array.Unboxed), or PackedString (which these days is implemented using unboxed arrays in GHC). Cheers, Simon