[lmm]

> However, when it comes to cache locality, if the C programmer knows what they are doing, I think you'll have a very hard time beating them with Haskell or ML.

A programmer who knows what they're doing is a rare thing indeed. On actual business problems with real-world programmers Haskell consistently beats C, IME.

> AFAIK those languages have the same pointer-chasing issues I've described earlier.

There's a pragma to flatten strict record fields, or a compiler flag to do that by default (at least in GHC).