On 2/24/13 1:34 PM, Marko Topolnik wrote:
I'm no Haskell expert, but it doesn't take much Googling to give
strong evidence that the answer is "yes, you can get mutability in
Haskell". Search through this Haskell program on the Benchmarks
Game site for occurrences of the string "unsafe".
I see; quite disgusting :)
In my experience writing Clojure programs for the Benchmarks Game,
getting within 10x is fairly easy, and doesn't require much
knowledge other than eliminating Clojure reflection, and using a
decent algorithm that doesn't throw in an extra factor of N by
accident. It often helps to use mutable Java arrays and Clojure
loops, too.
The default Clojure idiom is lazy seqs and higher-order functions.
That's what I have in mind when I say 100x slower. Loops, and
especially arrays, are a clear sign of optimization; they never come
as the most natural way to express a solution.
In languages such as Java there is just one idiom: the performant one.
That's why idiomatic Java performs well. In languages such as Clojure,
the most expressive idiom, the one the language is appreciated for, is
a level of abstraction or two above the performant idiom, so the
interesting question becomes, how much performance can be engineered
into /that/ level of abstraction. The question of the absolute
performance ceiling achievable within the language is also of
interest, but only secondary.
Now, my issue with a site such as the Benchmarks Game is that it will
never give a fair representation of that concern, and I bet it is
exactly this that most visitors of the site come looking for. That is
what I meant when I said that Haskell is quite performant: I've heard
/idiomatic/ Haskell performs well. I really couldn't care less how it
performs with those /unsafe/ monstrosities. Those features are, and
should be, reserved for the language's entrails, like the
implementation of the IO monad.
Yeah, I wish the Benchmarks allowed for idiomatic submissions and finely
tuned submissions. That would allow you to get some sort of an idea how
performant the dominant idiom is. Along those lines this older post did
an interesting analysis on the benchmark solutions where it explored the
tension that exists between expressiveness and performance across the
various languages:
http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of.html
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