-----Original Message----- From: Miles Egan [SMTP:miles@caddr.com] On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 10:11:20AM -0700, brk@jenkon.com wrote:

...

I have to say (and this also relates to the newbie question thread) that I don't understand why GHC fares so poorly, and I guess I find it a little frustrating.

I think it's important to keep these benchmarks in perspective, though. As Doug Bagley himself says, these kinds of benchmarks are pretty hard to interpret and are subject to a lot of noise. Extrapolating performance on small artificial problems like this to real application performance is not at all straightforward. That said, this is a small p.r. problem.

[Bryn Keller] While this is absolutely true, and well worth remembering, GHC's performance is in some cases reasonably competitive, but in others is many times slower than Ocaml. For instance: Times are C/Ocaml/GHC Sum a Column of Integers: 0.73 / 0.99 / 9.98 Array Access: 0.11/ 0.14 / 18.78 But there are also entries like: Ackermann's Function 0.09 / 0.04 / 0.06 Where Ocaml and GHC were both *faster* than C, and GHC was quite close to Ocaml. I'm just wondering why we can't get performance like (at least) Ocaml on all the tests, not just some. Bryn