Gregory Bellier wrote:
If you want speed then you should learn assembly or choose C as a second choice.
Certainly not assembly. Modern microprocessors just see assembly as a kind-of high level language which they interpret in a funny way, doing all sorts of re-schedulings, register renamings, delayed branching, speculative execution etc. Producing code that can take advantage of this is best left to the compiler - unless one has to deal with instruction set extensions for which there is no good compiler support yet.
It depends on the kind of apps you'd like to write. Even though O'Caml is fast, it's not the first criteria I have in mind which would be security : no segfault, no need to handle horrible stuff like in C, ...
I'd say the OCaml native compiler is reasonably fast for pretty much all applications that need the speed of compiled code. But I'd say the same for GHC and SBCL, say. There are some good reasons to take a closer look at OCaml, but these are related to other qualities of the language. In my view, its greatest benefit is that it makes working with closures simple while being fast and by far not as intimidating to (prospective) PhD students as Scheme/Lisp (but that only because most of them have been spoilt by imperative languages beforehand). -- best regards, Thomas Fischbacher t.fischbac...@soton.ac.uk _______________________________________________ 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
