The main point here is clearly not to sell the existing tool on the sole consideration of binary execution performances. As the article say, with Haskell you can produce more reliable software, thanks to a strong typing, and use higher abstraction levels. Even with a significant loss in performance, this can be a good trade off (depending on the project type of course).

So the point here is that you can have descent performance with a state of the art "high-level garbage-collected runtime-based language".