Hi
No-one is writing a commercial Haskell compiler yet (although there is at least one commercial Haskell-like language). What I mean is, the amount of "commercial-oriented" funding spent on GHC (as opposed to the "research-oriented" funding spent by Microsoft Research and various research bodies) is, as far as I know, zero. Incentives matter. If there were a commercial Haskell compiler, maybe we would see faster progress.
It isn't just about money. It's also about ideas, luck and randomly bumping into people. I am sure there is a great strategy for making really fast Haskell compilers, and I am sure at some point we'll figure out what it is. I agree with Bulat that Haskell has, if anything, even better optimisation potential than something like C. With Haskell you can do the crazy high-level optimisations that things like C would demand really advanced alias-analysis. Compare this to low-level optimisations which in Haskell require strictness analysis but in C are easy. At some point high-level will become more important than low-level, when it does, we win :-) Thanks Neil