[bitc-dev] Call by need?

[wren ng thornton]

On 9/10/10 3:55 PM, Pal Engstad wrote:
> On 9/10/2010 12:32 PM, wren ng thornton wrote:
>> [1] My numbers are borne out by some notorious competitions which are
>> often cited both for and against Haskell, despite how benchmarking
>> competitions pervert code far away from normal patterns:
>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
>
> I very much doubt you would write Haskell code like that... Ptr Word8? Is it even safe?

As I said, notorious and often cited both for and against. Benchmarking 
competitions generally have a way of perverting code away from natural 
style, regardless of the language; and this particular competition 
outlaws the use of libraries (or at least it used to; I don't follow it 
closely), which is a really big problem re comparing actual code in the 
wild. Haskell is a very library-oriented language and uses lots of small 
libraries, more like Perl's CPAN than like C libraries.

You can use Ptr Word8 to do unsafe things, but (Ptr a) is there to deal 
with FFI stuff and interacting with C is always unsafe. People certainly 
use it in real code when they need to marshall things back and forth 
across the FFI.

-- 
Live well,
~wren