[ck113]

I thought this was the most telling line of the article: "Ultimately the first factor of performance is the maturity of the implementation."

That supports a common conviction held by fans of functional programming: if all of the years of arduous optimization that have been poured into GCC had instead been poured into (say) GHC, then Haskell would be even faster today than C is.

That is, to many people functional programming languages seem to have more potential for performance than lower-level procedural languages, since they give the compiler so much more to work with, and in the long run a compiler can optimize much better than a programmer. But so much more work has been put into the C-style compilers that it's hard to make a fair comparison. It's still hard, but this experiment seems to give some solace to the FP camp.

[jongraehl]

Haskell may potentially be compiled to within epsilon of C when using strict evaluation + mutable state + unboxed types (look at the shootout implementations; the majority are in this style), but lazy evaluation and functional data structures have a real cost.

It's not merely that the ghc developers have been insufficiently clever and diligent.