On 04-Oct-2004, Jon Cast <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> held forth: > > If analyzing the performance and space usage of your programs is > > important, then Haskell may not be the best choice of language. > > I disagree. If performance and space usage are sufficiently important, > Haskell may not be best. But it's really not that much easier to > analyze performance or space usage under strict languages.
You're welcome to your opinion, but I don't agree; I find it much easier to analyze performance and space usage for strict languages. > In either case, the golden rule is: profile. Reading the source code will tell > you very little. Profiling can only tell you about the costs for a finite set of test cases. If you want to write robust and reliable programs, you need to analyze the worst-case memory usage, and that requires looking at the code, not just profiling. Of course, you can try to find a representative test set which will exercise the worst-case behaviour, but that task of determining which tests will exercise the worst-case behaviour will itself requires analysis of the code. That analysis is IMHO much more difficult in lazy languages. -- Fergus J. Henderson | "I have always known that the pursuit Galois Connections, Inc. | of excellence is a lethal habit" Phone: +1 503 626 6616 | -- the last words of T. S. Garp. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
