I was in a similar position than yours two years ago, looking for a higher level language than C to gain some expressive power but without willing to sacrifice C's speed. I consulted a lot of benchmarks from the shootout, and also many webpages similar to the one you refer to, some praising a language some criticizing it.
The various contenders of the shootout seamed to fall in three categories : languages that are fast compared to C, but does not reduce much the size of the source code (C++, java, APS...), languages that allow concise manipulations of non-trivial data structures (Lisps, MLs, Haskells), and non-compiled languages that I never considered adopting. I eliminated Haskell because GHC was only usable on x86 architecture at that time, so I tried various Lisp at first. Then a friend pointed me to Ocaml since, according to him, it's easier to cross the gap between C and Ocaml than between C and anything else. I thus finally tried Ocaml and, despite my initial apprehensions, I felt myself comfortable with its syntax after am couple of days. I am now using it whenever I have the choice to, after many years of C, mixing with C or ASM when necessary (which is quite easy), because I feel it's pleasant to use, and that I have still many things to learn from it, without the bad feeling to waste CPU cycles along the way. I like to think that if yon consider only speed and terseness of the code, Ocaml is still amongst the top languages ; probably not the #1 as stated by the (quite old) webpage you pointed to, but still excellent. _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
