Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[Walter Bright]

bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>> 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.


Fair enough, but in order to dismiss the results I'd need to know *why* the 
Haskell version failed so badly, and why such a straightforward attempt at 
parallelism is the wrong solution for Haskell.

You shouldn't have to be an expert in a language that is supposedly good at 
parallelism in order to get good results from it.

(Russel may or not be an expert, but he is certainly not a novice at FP or 
parallelism.)

Basically, I'd welcome an explanatory riposte to Russel's results.