From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2009-01-12T11:28:37+09:00
Subject: Re: functional programming

William James wrote:
> Brian Candler wrote:
> 
>> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>>>> For example, OCaml generates code which is 
>>>> reputedly only half the speed of the equivalent C code.
>>> Did you mean "twice the speed?" Is OCaml faster or slower than C?
>>> And why?
>> I did mean half the speed, i.e. OCaml is slower.
>>
>> OCaml is a high-level language, but code written in OCaml still
>> manages to achieve ~50% of the speed of hand-written C. Given that C
>> can be considered portable machine code, this is a pretty impressive 
>> achievement.
> 
> Don't take Ed seriously.  You will find that he never posts any
> Ruby code that he has written.

Not to the mailing list ... but to RubyForge :)

> And he has already been taught that OCaml can be as fast as C:
> 

Of course any language *can* be as fast as any other language. But will
it be *predictably* so for a wide class of benchmarks or applications? I
rather doubt it.


-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P), WOM

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.