[Haskell-cafe] Small question

[Hugh Perkins]

On 8/10/07, Stefan O'Rear <stefanor at cox.net> wrote:
>
> Haskell's purpose: To be a generally cool language
> Haskell's competition: C++, SML, ... hundreds of thousands more and I make
> no assertion of a representative sample ...
>

Well, C++ is not really competitive with Haskell, because C++ does not have
a GC, and it's trivial to corrupt the stack/heap.

Wrt imperative languages, it probably makes more sense to compare Haskell
with imperative languages that do have a GC and for which it's near
impossible to accidentally corrupt the stack/heap.  You'll find by the way
that the imperative GC'd, stack/heap protected languages run *significantly*
faster for many (not all I guess?) algorithms and applications.

This will change with threading of course, but still if you've got a
1024-core Niagara 2012 machine, and the Haskell algorithm runs 65536 times
as slowly as a single-core imperative GC'd language program, you're not
going to see a significant speed-up ;-)
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