Hello Manlio, Monday, September 22, 2008, 1:46:55 PM, you wrote:
This is cheating, IMHO. Some test comparisons are unfair.
this overall test is uselles for speed comparison. afair, there are only 2-3 programs whose speed isn't heavily depend on libraries. in DNA test, for example, Tcl (or PHP?) was leader just because it has better regexp library to make things even funnier, this test allows to use libs bundled to compiler, but not 3rd-arty ones. so ghc (not Haskell!) what includes more built-in libs than gcc looks like a leader. of course, noone uses bare ghc or gcc in real world even benchamrks that test pure speed of compiled code are useless because 1) they are imited by RAM speed, not speed of code itself 2) there uis a fashion in Haskell world to write for shootout in the very low-level style, which isn't actually used in real programming and actually understood only by a few "wizards" developing high-performance haskell code so actually that this shootout shows is that 1) in real world, program speed more depends on libs that on compilers. if you go to compare weak language plus lot of libs with a strong language with a few libs first variant will win (unless you go to reimplement all these libs at your own) 2) highly-optimized Haskell code is only 2-3 times slower than real C code produces by average C programmer. taken into account that such Haskell code is written many times slower than C one and need much more knowledge, Haskell hardly can be compared to C 3) if you need to compare real-world Haskell code with C one, you may look at these papers: An approach to fast arrays in Haskell http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/afp-arrays.ps.gz Rewriting Haskell Strings http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/fusion.pdf that they call "naive approach" is real Haskell programs not speeded up by special libs -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com