"Third, a comparison on speed between Haskell and C is almost meaningless, speed is not Haskells strongest point and it would be folly to bench it against C for that particular reason."
I disagree wholeheartedly. If I am choosing Haskell over C, I am giving up some (possibility of) performance. The question of how much is an important piece of information, entirely relevant to that decision.
As I observed in a comment on that other post, the actual performance of both the Haskell and the C depends on the amount of effort expended to make them faster (first in general, and then possibly on a particular architecture). At the limit, the C beats the Haskell by some margin - the size of that margin is informative; but that's also not the whole story - what the margin is earlier also matters, and for a particular project, it might matter more.
This is not to say that the particular benchmarks in the earlier article were good choices - I don't have a clear position on that.
I disagree wholeheartedly. If I am choosing Haskell over C, I am giving up some (possibility of) performance. The question of how much is an important piece of information, entirely relevant to that decision.
As I observed in a comment on that other post, the actual performance of both the Haskell and the C depends on the amount of effort expended to make them faster (first in general, and then possibly on a particular architecture). At the limit, the C beats the Haskell by some margin - the size of that margin is informative; but that's also not the whole story - what the margin is earlier also matters, and for a particular project, it might matter more.
This is not to say that the particular benchmarks in the earlier article were good choices - I don't have a clear position on that.
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