[thelucky41]

The benefit of this comparison is not that the languages have nearly identical performance, but that OCaml can be briefer while accomplishing the same task, with 47% less lines of code.

Saying nothing about comparing LOC in an imperative/OO language to a functional one, does the brevity actually help a reader's understanding of the code at all? It seems to me that a lot of the comparisons call out descriptions of explicit actions in C++ where OCaml does the same action implicitly.

That seems like a language trade-off more than a feature.

[progman]

Most people just consider the raw execution time to measure performance. In long-term applications that really matters.

In usual applications however most people don't realize that the development time should also be considered. In that sense a program written in a few lines of Python could actually outperform a super optimized C++ program because it usually requires more time and effort to code the same thing in C++.