ndmitchell:
Hi
I've been working on optimising Haskell for a little while (http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/supero/), so here are my thoughts on this. The Clean and Haskell languages both reduce to pretty much the same Core language, with pretty much the same type system, once you get down to it - so I don't think the difference between the performance is a language thing, but it is a compiler thing. The uniqueness type stuff may give Clean a slight benefit, but I'm not sure how much they use that in their analyses.
Both Clean and GHC do strictness analysis - I don't know which one does better, but both do quite well. I think Clean has some generalised fusion framework, while GHC relies on rules and short-cut deforestation. GHC goes through C-- to C or ASM, while Clean has been generating native code for a lot longer. GHC is based on the STG machine, while Clean is based on the ABC machine - not sure which is better, but there are differences there.
My guess is that the native code generator in Clean beats GHC, which wouldn't be too surprising as GHC is currently rewriting its CPS and Register Allocator to produce better native code.
Yes, this was my analysis too -- its in the native code gen. Which is perhaps the main GHC bottleneck now. -- Don