I don't think I made a mark against the language itself, or tried to rule it out, or tried to indicate it cannot attain the highest levels of performance -
Yes, my point was just that there are programmers using Haskell in a non-optimal way. Beginners seem to be surprised when their Haskell code isn't automatically in the upper level.
I'm not really a great fan of benchmarks, or this particular benchmark, but at least the source of every test is available:
"One can, with sufficient effort, essentially write C code in Haskell using various unsafe primitives. We would argue that this is not true to the spirit and goals of Haskell, and we have attempted in this paper to remain within the space of “reasonably idiomatic” Haskell. However, we have made abundant use of strictness annotations, explicit strictness, and unboxed vectors. We have, more controversially perhaps, used unsafe array subscripting in places. Are our choices reasonable?"
No, that's not idiomatic Haskell code for an application. Foreign.Ptr (and companions) are hardly ever used in normal Haskell code unless you're optimizing for that last bit of performance -- and even then I'd be very hesitant about using it because of the lack of bounds checking, etc.
FWIW, I don't Don Stewart[0] would consider that idiomatic either. He just knows a bit more than the rest of us about how to squeeze more performance out of GHC-compiled code and was willing to use non-idiomatic code to do so.
Also FWIW, personally I don't think language shootouts are very informative most of the time, but... IMO they should at least use idiomatic code -- otherwise they tell you even less than they already do about what real-life performance is like.
[0] Just an example, I know he didn't contribute the particular benchmark you linked to. He did contribute a few of the other programs AFAIK. I think the following sentences also apply to (essentially) all the Haskell shootout contributors.
> Do you think "optimizing for that last bit of performance" doesn't happen in the wild?
Of course it does, but the cost increases non-linearly and you have to find the right trade-off for the situation at hand. Do you want maintainability or absolute performance?
> Provide some!
Of course one could, but that would that accomplish? Everyone who thinks these benchmarks have value just looks at the fastest-performing version of $YOUR_LANG_BENCHMARK. Hint: Mostly it won't be idiomatic regardless of the value of $YOUR_LANG.
Do you think the source code for those optimized for the last bit of performance programs tells us something about that?
>Of course one could, but what would that accomplish?<
Could one? Perhaps there'd be complaints that your "idiomatic programs" were just naïve.
A passive website like the benchmarks game can never be enough, by itself, to educate and inform all (or even most) readers -- reading selectively is far too commonplace and errare humanum est.
The benchmarks game is a resource. There are enough examples that when someone draws a misinformed conclusion, we can usually show them a counter-example and ask them to think.
But only if someone contributes those (whatever they consider idiomatic to be) idiomatic programs as counter-examples.
Yes, my point was just that there are programmers using Haskell in a non-optimal way. Beginners seem to be surprised when their Haskell code isn't automatically in the upper level.
I'm not really a great fan of benchmarks, or this particular benchmark, but at least the source of every test is available:
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...