Re:Why don't we listen to Occam's Razor when it comes to pro...
by CyberFonic on Thursday December 10, 2015 @01:43AM
(#10709236)
If you like Caramel, nobody here is going to tell you to use something else. Each to their own.
Agreed, λ-calculus is simple and clean. But what about the machine code being generated? Eventually, each concept in the abstraction has to be translated, often through several layers, to memory locations, register contents and the available instructions. Allowing for cache issues and out of order instruction issue. It is because of these and many other reasons that compilers, such as gcc, have gotten so big and complex.
About the performance of the program itself, yes, λcalculus is faster than Scheme, by an order of magnitude, sometimes. For one, algorithms on church-encoded lists fuse by reduction, which means that the code below, in Caramel:
fuses to a single tight loop - i.e., it iterates through the lists `a` and `b` only once, and returns the result after that, creating no intermediate structure. Scheme would create 4 intermediate structures on this case. Since it is already 2~3x slower than the λ-calculus (running on GHC), that'd make it an order of magnitude slower in that case.