On Saturday 23 June 2007 13:02:54 Andrew Coppin wrote:
Well, I altered the code, and it's *still* very short and very readable, and it's just as fast as the (3 pages long) C++ version. >:-D
Indeed. The performance of modern functional programming languages never ceases to amaze me. INRIA typically claim performance within 2x of C for OCaml but there are very few programs where OCaml isn't within 50% now, at least on AMDs. Most of the pedagogical examples of functional programming (e.g. n-queens) are too academic for general consumption but there are plenty of excellent examples. Burrows-Wheeler is a great one. Ray tracing is another. Sudoku solving is fairy good, albeit unusually well suited to arrays. I also like to compare the performance of term-level interpreters or rewriters implemented in different languages. I think it would be interesting to compare Scheme/Mathematica interpreters written in OCaml, SML (MLton) and Haskell, for example. I've benchmarked some interpreters in OCaml and SML (MLton) and MLton's whole-program optimizations are a huge benefit here, making it several times faster than OCaml. I'd like to know how well Haskell would do. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. The OCaml Journal http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_journal/?e