"Ch. A. Herrmann" wrote:
> I believe that if as much research were spent on Haskell compilation as
> on C compilation, Haskell would outperform C.
I wish I could say I believed that. The big thing you aren't going to be
able to optimise away is laziness, which means you are going to have unevaluated
thunks rather than values all over the place. Of course you can put strictness
annotations in all over the place if you want to, but then that rather spoils
the point of Haskell.
On the other hand Haskell may start looking more favourable in a few years.
It seems to me that the Von Neumann architecture
(one processor sitting in the middle, sending out messages when it wants data)
is really creaking at the seams right now. Multiple caches and pipelining
are becoming ever more important, but there's only so much that can be
done with conventional programming languages. (Hence claims of processor
speed, which usually assume zero CPU wait time and the sort of scheduling only
available with hand-tuned assembler, bear less and less resemblance to reality
every year.) However Haskell is much easier to reason about and should be
much easier to parallelise, so its time may come even where performance is
important. I hope.
