Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?

["Mark T.B. Carroll" <Mark.Carroll@Aetion.com>]

Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> writes:

> Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
>> Have a look at Haskell.
>
> He said performance was important.

And it's achievable in Haskell, especially with a bunch of the work
that's been done in GHC 6.6, 6.8, 6.10, and especially if you have
multiple cores. (I'm not just talking about things like short cut
fusion, but a bunch of library improvements like in ByteStrings.)

The caveat - and you may consider it a showstopper, but I don't - is
that it's easy for a newbie to write grossly inefficient Haskell. It
takes some understanding of what GHC's up to and what fancy stuff is
available, and some use of the profiler, to really be able to eke good
performance out of the system, and you may not think it acceptable that
(a) it's not easy for new users to figure out how to get good
performance from it and (b) if a part of the code has to be much changed
to make it fast, that part often ends up looking rather ugly. (I'd be
interested to see if Haskell fans can rebut me on those points, but
I bet some of the language shootout code still looks horrifying.)

Admittedly, the last I looked, it may be that Data.HashTable is still
slower than I'd have thought reasonable. But if I figure that if I
use it anyway then someone'll fix it and I'll notice the improvement
when I upgrade GHC. (-:

[ followups trimmed ]

Mark