Gwern Branwen wrote: ...
" Ultimately, the problem with Haskell and ML for our purposes is that the brightest and most aggressive programmers in those languages, using the most aggressive optimization techniques known to the research community, remain unable to write systems codes that compete reasonably with C or C++. The most successful attempt to date is probably the FoxNet TCP/IP protocol stack, which incurred a 10x increase in system load and a 40x penalty in accessing external memory relative to a conventional (and less aggressively optimized) C implemenation. [ 4 ,6 ]"
Interesting paper. Putting these remarks in context, in case anyone takes them as a current critique of Haskell, they are apparently about ten years out-of-date and apply to this SML program http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fox/foxnet.html I wonder what would happen if the program was ported and benchmarked in a recent version of GHC. Richard.