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Haskell overpromised a lot. When I looked at it, the favourite quicksort example was so elegant, I wanted to learn the language. Then after I started looking a

Haskell overpromised a lot. When I looked at it, the favourite quicksort example was so elegant, I wanted to learn the language. Then after I started looking at the run time (after wasting a lot of time going through learning Haskell), I realized that it was all a lie, ant that sort wasn't quick at all. I don't see the same overpromising problems with Rust: you usually get the performance that you think you will get when you're writing the code.

travv0 6y ago
So let me get this straight: You don't like Haskell because someone used it to write an inefficient quicksort example online?
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Not somebody, it was on the home page as a use case of how much better Haskell is than other languages. The default libraries are extremely inefficient. Generally if I use Python/Ruby I can get a 50x slow down that is accepted, but with Haskell it can be more, as it's very hard to think about what the compiler does (memory usage can blow up easily).
  - reddit_clone 6y ago
    To be fair, that code is to illustrate the beauty of the language rather than efficiency. (Also the fibonacci sequence using 'zip'. Blew my mind.) Haskell folks are fairly upfront about possible performance issues. Lazy evaluation comes with its own set of tradeoffs. You can write very inefficient code in C++ if your algorithm isn't efficient.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      I still don’t see any tradeoffs explained, quite the opposite is on the home page: ,,The purity of Haskell code makes it easy to fuse chains of functions together, allowing for performance benefits.’’ Having something ,,beautiful’’ and inefficient is the problem I’m writing about. The language itself is guiding people to inefficiency. I haven’t felt this with C++, so I’m not sure what you are talking about: usually simple / pretty code runs fast there, and more complex code runs slower.
marcosdumay 6y ago
Yeah, Haskell won't give you Rust-like performance. Very few languages will and, except for C, you won't even see them here on the comments. Haskell can have a reasonable high performance, but if it's you main concern, or if predictability is important, you need a low level language.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Right now I'm using Julia for high performance math heavy modelling with lots of experimentation, and it's great for this purpose. I can get most of C++'s advantages without giving up on flexibility. My code base wouldn't scale to team work / production software though as well as C++.

travv0 6y ago

So let me get this straight: You don't like Haskell because someone used it to write an inefficient quicksort example online?

xiphias2 6y ago
Not somebody, it was on the home page as a use case of how much better Haskell is than other languages. The default libraries are extremely inefficient. Generally if I use Python/Ruby I can get a 50x slow down that is accepted, but with Haskell it can be more, as it's very hard to think about what the compiler does (memory usage can blow up easily).
- reddit_clone 6y ago
  To be fair, that code is to illustrate the beauty of the language rather than efficiency. (Also the fibonacci sequence using 'zip'. Blew my mind.) Haskell folks are fairly upfront about possible performance issues. Lazy evaluation comes with its own set of tradeoffs. You can write very inefficient code in C++ if your algorithm isn't efficient.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    I still don’t see any tradeoffs explained, quite the opposite is on the home page: ,,The purity of Haskell code makes it easy to fuse chains of functions together, allowing for performance benefits.’’ Having something ,,beautiful’’ and inefficient is the problem I’m writing about. The language itself is guiding people to inefficiency. I haven’t felt this with C++, so I’m not sure what you are talking about: usually simple / pretty code runs fast there, and more complex code runs slower.

marcosdumay 6y ago

Yeah, Haskell won't give you Rust-like performance. Very few languages will and, except for C, you won't even see them here on the comments. Haskell can have a reasonable high performance, but if it's you main concern, or if predictability is important, you need a low level language.

xiphias2 6y ago
Right now I'm using Julia for high performance math heavy modelling with lots of experimentation, and it's great for this purpose. I can get most of C++'s advantages without giving up on flexibility. My code base wouldn't scale to team work / production software though as well as C++.