Why such poor recursive behaviour?

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#1105

From: namekuseijin
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:01

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I wonder why most functional programming languages fail so badly at
what should be one of their primary main strengths:  recursive
functions.

In the well-known benchmarking game called "The computer game
shootout", most such languages fail miserably in the face of blazing
fast imperative code during the benchmarking of recursive functions
such as ackermann or fibonacci:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=recursive&lang=all

The best is clean, only 1.6 slower than gcc C.

The chart:
1.6 Clean
3.2 OCaml (just behind Fortran and Java!)
3.3 F# (running in mono)
3.4 SML on MLton (just after FreeBasic!)
3.4 Haskell GHC (just after Java on gcj!  almost a tie-in)
3.6 CL on SBCL (almost as good as compiled lazy static Haskell)
3.7 Scheme on Chicken (just after sbcl)
4.0 SML/NJ (just after C# on mono)
4.6 Scheme on Ikarus (just after Java -client!)
8.1 Scheme PLT (just after Fortran, again)

Well, that's about it.

I know in the grand scheme of things, such timings are not that bad,
not orders of magnitude slower like some of the dynamic scripting
stinkers in the bottom, specially in the face of such classy and easy
syntax and semantics adding to programmer productivity.  Still, kind
of a let down, like buying a Playstation 3 and waiting for a killer
app that never comes...

Any thoughts?

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From: namekuseijin <namekuseijin@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional,fa.caml,fa.haskell,comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Why such poor recursive behaviour?
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:01:37 -0700 (PDT)
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