From: Jon Harrop <jon@...>
Date: 2007-06-02T16:40:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby & OCaml (was Re: Underscore)

Mauricio Fernandez wrote:
> The most recent
> IronPython vs. CPython benchmark I've found[1] reveals that the former is
> not faster than the latter.

Wow. That's absolutely fascinating.

I've put a lot of effort into learning the new F# programming language from
Microsoft Research. It is derived from the Caml family of functional
programming languages and suffers from similar performance trade-offs taken
by .NET:

1. Allocation is much slower because the .NET allocator is designed to work
with object lifetime distributions typical of C#.

2. Exceptions are 600x slower on .NET and exceptions are ubiquitous in
OCaml, used extensively by the stdlib for common cases (e.g. not finding an
element in a dictionary).

3. Tail calls are also ubiquitous in functional languages and they are many
times slower on the .NET platform. You can ask the compiler to use non-tail
calls but then you run the risk of blowing stack.

So the differences between OCaml and F# hit worst case in a wide variety of
real situations. Very interesting to see that the performance differences
are so huge that they even affect interpreted languages. I would not have
expected that.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/?usenet