Re: [Haskell-cafe] Can Haskell outperform C++?

----- Original Message -----

From: "ok@cs.otago.ac.nz" Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 9:38 AM Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Can Haskell outperform C++?

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and if we want to compare *languages*, we should use identical algorithms to make the comparison fair.

In the permutation generation example, I was talking about four programs:           Language X  Language Y Method 1  Program X1  Program Y1  -- identical algorithms Method 2  Program X2  Program Y2  -- identical algorithms

However, "identical" isn't clearly defined.

Moreover, being absolutely sure that the algorithms are in some sense "identical" might make comparison pointless - for example, when the same assembly is generated by gcc from a C program and gnat from an Ada program. -snip-

In the 'tsort' case, it turns out that the Java and Smalltalk versions are I/O bound with over 90% of the time spent just reading the data.

My guess is that they could be written to do better than that - but it's idiotic of me to say so without understanding the specifics, please forgive me ;-)

They have I/O libraries with very different structures, so what does "identical algorithms" mean?  If you are using dictionaries/hashmaps, and the two languages have implementations that compute different hash functions for strings, is _that_ using the same implementation?

Of course, to some degree, user defined hash functions remedy that specific problem. I agree with the thrust of your comments - even programming languages (and implementations) that seem similar, are often so different (when we get down to specifics) that comparison between programs written in different languages is a matter of making the best of a bad job. But we're still going to ask - Will my program be faster if I write it in language X? - and we're still going to wish for a simpler answer than - It depends how you write it!