This is both a straw man (OP asked for limited help, not omnipotence), and predicting the future by drawing a line from the past. Functional compilers that out

This is both a straw man (OP asked for limited help, not omnipotence), and predicting the future by drawing a line from the past. Functional compilers that outperform hand tuned C++ on many core machines may be possible, but very hard. Just because everyone has previously underestimated the difficulty does not mean it's an idea worthy of derision. I think it's much more likely that it's perpetually ten years away, until one day it's not (like the current, possibly temporary end to Moore's Law). Watching Simon Peyton Jones' talk on data parallel Haskell, I'd not make a bet against high performance Haskell's eventual success, especially as core counts continue to climb, and NUMA gets more NU. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8