Curious about the hash table problem
An old post from Stack Overflow : In short, even with the fix in the latest GHC, Haskell is still incapable of providing a dictionary (mutable or immutable) that is competitively efficient. Haskell's hash tables were 32× slower than alternatives like C++ and .NET with GHC 6.10. That was partly due to a performance bug in the GHC garbage collector that was fixed for GHC 6.12.2 . But Simon Marlow's results there show only a 5× performance improvement which still leaves Haskell's hash tables many times slower than most alternatives. Purely functional alternatives are also much slower than a decent hash table. For example, Haskell's IntMap is 10× slower than .NET's hash table . Using F# 2010 and the latest Haskell Platform 2010.2.0.0 (released yesterday!) with GHC 6.12.3 on this 2.0GHz E5405 Xeon running 32-bit Windows Vista to insert 20M int->int bindings into an empty hash table we find that Haskell is still 29× slower than F# in real time and ...