2008/9/23 Bulat Ziganshin
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wc seems to do fine; you'll notice it drops "lines" after the first version.
actually it counts lines using built-in function. you may find that naive C is 6x fatser than naive Haskell and difference is so small only because C version is bound by memory speed
So what ? Strings represented as lists of character are slow ? What an incredible discovery ! The ByteString versions are fast, ByteString was invented especially for IO intensive situation, it's a library you can use pretty naively and mostly get excellent performances, what exactly isn't Haskelly enough for you in this solution ? The guts of ByteString aren't idiomatic Haskell ? And ? The guts of the JVM aren't written in Java either... At least ByteString was built over GHC which means it can be done. Besides a part of the performances of ByteString comes from stream fusion and that's specifically something that is hard to achieve outside of Haskell... What exactly is your point ? - Haskell is slow, we can't make it faster ? That's obviously false as demonstrated by the progress in the latest years. - Haskell is slower than C ? Well that's probably true, because C can touch the hardware directly and can always optimize every single aspects of a computation... On the other hand that kind of uber optimization has a cost that I am unwilling to pay, I would rather write high level Haskell and pay a little hit on execution time. - We shouldn't center ourselves around performance to promote Haskell (or should we even promote Haskell) ? Well there you may have a point, but maybe it would be better to just make it and avoid denying other peoples efforts to make Haskell faster ? -- Jedaï