Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

> The truth is that the Haskell compiler will never be able to automatically translate idiomatic Haskell code into something that’s competitive with C in the common case.

Is this something you have experience with, or are you just theorizing? I know there are pitfalls to Haskell development, but to assert that "the common case" has uncompetitive performance seems wrong to me.

My problem with this kind of assertions is that often -- not saying it's your case, that's why I'm asking -- they come from people who imagine how it must be (or read it in a blog), often coming from a place of never really having tried to solve something with the language, and this sadly percolates into popular wisdom ("Haskell is not good for this or that"). Something similar happened to Java's allegedly "poor" performance, way past the point Java software sometimes outperformed C in many areas.

View on HN

I think it's a common problem with almost all, if not all, languages that come to us out of the 1990s that they are fundamentally built on the presumption that "someday" compilers may save us. Well, "someday" is pretty much here, and they've all failed, as far as I'm concerned. (If you're happy with 10x-slower-than-C and substantial memory eaten to get even that fast, YMMV, but it's not what was hoped for. No sarcasm on that, BTW; sometimes that's suitable, just like sometimes 50x-slower-than-C is suitable. But it's not what was hoped for.)

Haskell can do some pretty tricks with specific code if you tickle it right, but if you just write general, normal code, it's faster than Python (a low bar, Python qua Python is nearly the slowest language in anything like common use) but not a generally "fast" language. "Someday" is here; if it's not "generally C-fast" today, I see no particular reason to believe it will be in the future either, especially since GHC seems to have spent a great deal of its design budget.

It would be interesting to see someone's take on Haskell, but where they write the language from the very beginning to be a high-performance language. There's probably multiple points in this design space that would be possible. Arguably Rust is nearly one of them, and getting even closer in the next few years.

You might be interested in Cliff Click’s aa[0].

It’s still under development but intended to be a high performance functional language.

The author has substantial experience in JITs and compilers.

[0] https://github.com/cliffclick/aa

Yes I have many many hours of experience with Haskell and familiarity with functional programming. I’m speaking from experience.

Optimizing Haskell code is a huge downer. The experience of having to throw away beautiful code and rewrite it in C++ or non-idiomatic Haskell purely for performance reasons is extremely disheartening. I don’t recommend it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com