When Haskell Is Not faster than C

Nice refutation. The problem about doing language comparisons for speed is that they generally require a non-trivial example, so you have to be an excellent programmer in all the languages you've compared.

Of course, language speed charts are generally as useful as PC spec charts and YouTube videos of Nürburgring laptimes when you're buying a new car.

> So why, despite this knowledge, do we engage in "language speed flamewars" like this?

That was exactly the point.

The reason why this happens is because people are - just like me - invested in their tools, they want to tell themselves they made the right choice. And then they want to tell the world the same thing.

For me it doesn't matter which language is faster in a project. The parameter space that decides which language is 'right' is rarely determined by raw speed. But for those cases where raw speed is the determining factor you could do a lot worse than using C, and if you have latency requirements it is almost unavoidable on most ordinary platforms that we use.

Could everyone on HN just take a course in languages theory so we can all stop with these stupid trolls about the best languages which have been emerging for a week.

Hopefully it would allow everyone to realize that a language is just some syntax and semantic and that a compiler is just a program like another. Nothing sacred here. Hell you can even do imperative programming in Haskell if you wish. Coding an interpreter to do so is not particularly difficult.

With a bit of luck, everyone would understand at the same time that the compiler is building what is executed therefore the expression"speed of a language" is utter nonsense. You can only speak of the speed of the implementation which, yes, vary widely amongst compilers for the same language.

So, yes, Haskell semantics encourage functional programming, C semantics imperative programming, both are Turing complete and yes GCC is currently better at optimising C code than any Haskell compiler, nothing new under the sun. Can we all go back to a normal activity now ?

This reminds me that when I was interested in learning haskell I was completely put off by their "introduction" page on their homepage. It was a couple of years ago but it doesn't seem to have changed much:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction

It looks like a very pretentious sales pitch to me. You have quotes like "Writing large software systems that work is difficult and expensive. [...] Functional programming languages, such as Haskell, can make it easier and cheaper." and a whole bunch of very vague and poorly backed up assertions.

After a couple of paragraphs brainwashing you about how good functional programming is, you finally get to some code. The first code you get is (of all things) a quicksort which is not used as an introduction to the language but as a way to boast that haskell is so much better and more expressive than C. I mean, look at that C code just after it, disgusting isn't it.

What they don't say is how much slower their implementation is, of course. They also give a link to a more direct (and faster) C-to-haskell version of the quicksort[1]. Hey, it's actually longer than the C version! And it uses 3 imports. And it's still slower than the original C. Oops. I wonder why they didn't put that one in the tutorial. I went back to common lisp after that, I have yet to write 1 line of haskell.

TL;DR: when I want an introduction to your language, I want to know what I can do with it and how I can do it. Give me some code to chew on, show off some features. Don't spend 10 pages telling me you're the best of the best and everything else is crap. This is the kind of article I expect: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html

[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction/Direct_Trans...

Some people like bickering. But I think the point of the article is that C is, by nature of the language, easier to optimize than Haskell, since it is lower level.