Comments on: Perl, Powered By Haskell

By: Audrey T

Audrey T — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 12:24:00 +0000

Actually, in the Alioth benchmark, Haskell is above C++ in CPU use, and above everything else in LOC and combined score: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&xfullcpu=1&xmem=0&xloc=0

By: Robbo

Robbo — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:58:37 +0000

Haskell faster than C++?? Does he mean in coding time? Because if he means execution time, everything else I’ve read indicates Haskell is way down on the list of speed. OCaml is often compared favorably to C++ speed-wise.

By: jgoerzen

jgoerzen — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:30:27 +0000

I also learned OCaml first. It was a nice language, but some things bugged me: its weak I/O and the fact that its lists aren’t lazy. In my opinion, lists in OCaml should have operated like streams in OCaml do.

Then I discovered Haskell, where lists work just like I wanted them to.

I’ve been very happy.

You are correct about the standard library size, but there has been quite a bit of work on that in Haskell in the past year or so. Haskell takes a Perlish approach of having a smaller standard library, but many easy-to-install modules. In the past year, we’ve seen new modules for SSL, IPv6, LDAP, Python integration, libmagic, Perl regexps, FTP clients and servers, filesystem virtualization, FUSE (filesystems in userland), and a few more. That in addition to the strong base (and the amazing Parsec parser combinator library).

So yes, we don’t have quite all the frills of Python’s library (IMAP library, for instance), but we do have quite a few things going.

By: Rui

Rui — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:59:50 +0000

I’m inclined to learn Haskell as I already have learned Caml which is also a functional language. I can see that these languages have some advantages over, say java, the problem to their wider adoption I think is the lack of a big “standard library” like you get in java. I’d really like to see them more used though…