Except that it isn't faster at runtime (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?t...).

If you want to prove your point, using totally unrealistic micro-"benchmarks" such as those is by far the worst way about doing so. You're better off giving no evidence whatsoever than you are referring to those.

Are there any more realistic benchmarks that we can refer to? Because I've read a lot about how Haskell supposedly runs faster because of its purity, but I've not seen a lot of evidence actually supporting that notion.

"[B]etter off giving no evidence" than pointing to measurements that provide a known context -- source code, implementation version, command lines, measurement scripts...

Nonsense.

Almost all the Haskell entries in the shootout are just using the FFI to call into C libraries. None of them are remotely close to idiomatic Haskell.

Everyone knows, of course, that these benchmarks don't tell the whole story. However, it's ludicrous to assert that providing no evidence is better than providing a array of microbenchmarks across a variety of different languages, machines and implementations. Further, the assertion that Haskell is "faster" (in some blanket sense) than Scala is completely evidence-free.

@profdemarco --- sure; and they're still not faster than their Scala counterparts.