Sat, 18 Sep 1999 00:06:37 +0200 (MET DST), Juergen Pfitzenmaier
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> pisze:
> I dont't care very much how fast a program runs. I care about how
> long it takes me to write it. If you take a programming task of
> reasonable complexity you will finish *months* earlier using a
> --good-- functional language instead of C++.
>
> Use a functional language and buy a faster computer with the saved
> money/time.
I have to care how fast my programs run. I like writing in Haskell
very much, it's my favorite general-purpose language, but one of the
biggest weak points of Haskell for me is poor efficiency (at least
with ghc, I don't know how fast are other compilers). I wonder whether
this is the issue of Haskell itself or the compilers, I wonder if I
can expect things to go better in future.
I had to write and maintain a boring program calculating lots of
numbers from matrices, trying various permutations of rows and columns,
joining rows and columns, generating random matrices meeting specific
criteria, searching for ones that maximize certain formulae etc.
I didn't know Haskell that time and I wrote the core in C++, wrapping
it in shell and perl scripts.
It takes a whole night to compute some data on 1000 matrices. Now
I would not write the program in Haskell, even though it would be
much simpler and easier to extend. I can't wait two weeks for results
each time. It's faster to spend one more day of awful coding in C++
because the results are needed as soon as possible.
OK, maybe it's not enough complex to make the difference in development
time bigger, but it's real.
I don't have money yet for a faster computer than my 3 years old
Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM.
I would be much more happy if Haskell could be compiled to a more
efficient code. "Only 10 times slower than C" may be unacceptable.
Sometimes the speed doesn't matter, sometimes it does. It's not fun
to use a worse language only because a better one is too slow.
IMHO most C and assembler programmers care too much about execution
speed. Here I see the opposite.
Maybe it's simply not possible to compile Haskell more efficiently?
--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk * [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kki.net.pl/qrczak/
\__/ GCS/M d- s+:-- a22 C+++>+++$ UL++>++++$ P+++ L++>++++$ E-
^^ W++ N+++ o? K? w(---) O? M- V? PS-- PE++ Y? PGP->+ t
QRCZAK 5? X- R tv-- b+>++ DI D- G+ e>++++ h! r--%>++ y-
