If you’re writing idiomatic Haskell. Its performance is terrible.
If you’re choosing to fight with Haskell, why? Just use something else.
To understand why people claim Haskell is “fast”, you need to understand what they mean. What they mean is “if you opted to write C in such a way as you were performing similar amounts of copious and useless data copying, pointer following and stack blowing madness, Haskell will perform that fast”. They are not saying “Haskell is as fast as the fastest idiomatic C implementation”.
Another thing you’re going to see a lot of is extremely simple anecdotes, such as counting in a loop, or favourable measure points (they will measure the whole c program, but just the point in Haskell after they’ve flattened data, for example, stating “we just want to compare those parts”).
I think if your runtime performance is terrible with Haskell, either the explanation is that you might be doing something a bit crazy, or that your application is memory-constrained.
The explanation is that Haskell has terrible performance idioms like “copying shit for no reason all the time”.
There’s a reason that the prevailing opinion on language performance within the Haskell community is “thinking about performance of a language is a premature optimization”
This, of course, ignores that Haskells poor performance characteristics are actually technical debt, for which all people should be considering off the bat for their project. You cannot simultaneously say “premature” and not also add this to the techdebt column.
There comes a time in *all* scaling applications that Haskell will be such a burden, that it’ll be forced to be rewritten.
Yeah. And one of us is objectively, measurably correct, while the other is speaking in terms of “performance is a premature optimization” Haskell community brainwashing tomfoolery.
I mean. Fundamentally, reducing cache invalidation, reducing pointer following, and branch prediction are like 80% of your performance gains today. Haskell, being bad at all of these, fundamentally will never perform from a language standpoint.
You can make all the “I believe!!!” Arguments you like. Belief is not fact. Fact is that Haskell measurably performs badly, and Haskell idioms will never perform well.
If your organization is okay with accepting that huge performance tech debt, that’s a choice for your org.
In concrete terms, what are these Haskell idioms, what are their measured performance characteristics, and what are alternative idioms for each that perform better? Is there a write up that you could share about this?
I think it would be truly educational. Without that though, your statements appear equally as anecdotal.
> the other is speaking in terms of “performance is a premature optimization”
While I do think this is often and perhaps even usually true, it’s irrelevant to anything I’ve said in this thread, and I wasn’t even thinking in these terms.
If you’re choosing to fight with Haskell, why? Just use something else.
To understand why people claim Haskell is “fast”, you need to understand what they mean. What they mean is “if you opted to write C in such a way as you were performing similar amounts of copious and useless data copying, pointer following and stack blowing madness, Haskell will perform that fast”. They are not saying “Haskell is as fast as the fastest idiomatic C implementation”.
Another thing you’re going to see a lot of is extremely simple anecdotes, such as counting in a loop, or favourable measure points (they will measure the whole c program, but just the point in Haskell after they’ve flattened data, for example, stating “we just want to compare those parts”).