Writing the fastest possible implementation of something is rarely a valid business goal. The ideal is the midpoint on a Venn diagram of 1) fast enough for our

Writing the fastest possible implementation of something is rarely a valid business goal. The ideal is the midpoint on a Venn diagram of 1) fast enough for our purposes, 2) logically robust, 3) cheap to implement. Besides, if something absolutely must be the fastest implementation possible and this can’t be done in Haskell, then there’s no reason why one couldn’t drop to the FFI at that point. You could even use template Haskell and write inline-C. It works.