OT (partially): about promotion of integers

[SomeDude]

On Wednesday, 12 December 2012 at 20:01:43 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 12/12/2012 03:45 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 12/11/2012 5:05 PM, bearophile wrote:
>>> Walter Bright:
>>>
>>>> ML has been around for 30-40 years, and has failed to catch 
>>>> on.
>>>
>>> OcaML, Haskell, F#, and so on are all languages derived more 
>>> or less
>>> directly
>>> from ML, that share many of its ideas. Has Haskell caught on? 
>>> :-)
>>
>> Haskell is the language that everyone loves to learn and talk 
>> about, and
>> few actually use.
>>
>> And it's significantly slower than D,
>
> (Sufficiently sane) languages are not slow or fast and I think 
> the factor GHC/DMD cannot be more than about 2 or 3 for roughly 
> equivalently written imperative code.
>
> Furthermore no D implementation has any kind of useful 
> performance for lazy functional style D code.
>
> In some ways, D is very significantly slower than Haskell. The 
> compilers optimize specific coding styles better than others.
>
>> in unfixable ways.
>>
>
> I disagree. That is certainly fixable. It is a mere QOI issue.

Actually, a factor of 2 to 3 can be huge. Consider that java is 
around a factor 2 or less to C++ in the Computer Languages 
Benchmark Game, and yet, you easily feel the difference everyday 
on your desktop applications.
But although the pure computation power is not very different, 
the real difference I believe lies the memory management, which 
is probably far less efficient in Java than in C++.