Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
> It wasn't me, it was Russell Wider. He wrote a parallel pi calculating program 
> in several languages, and then tried it with 1, 2, 4, and 8 cores. The more 
> cores, the longer the Haskell program took. Charting the core use showed that 
> only one core would run at a time.
> 
> Same with OCaml.
> 
> OCaml has a global interpreter lock which explains its behavior. Russell didn't 
> know why the Haskell behavior was so bad. He allowed that it was possible he was 
> misusing it.

You have just the illusion to have learned something about this. Trying to read too much from this single example is very wrong. A single benchmark, written by a person not expert in the language, means nearly nothing. You need at least a suite of good benchmarks, written by people that know the respective languages. And even then, you have just an idea of the situation.

Bye,
bearophile