Comment by rtpg
12 years ago
>Sure, but how much slower is Haskell than an equivalent implementation in C? Some quick searching suggests numbers like 1000% slower...
With things like stream fusion (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...) , which I imagine would capture a lot of crypto calls, GHC can generate some very performant code (paper contains examples of hand-written C code being beat by Haskell code, and the C code is far from naive).
There are a lot of tricks at your disposal when you know more about the state of the code. And compilers are usually better than humans in this regard.
That paper is extremely fascinating, thanks for sharing.
As an aside, I'm reasonably sure that GCC can use SIMD instructions for certain bulk memory operations in certain circumstances if you feed it the right -march= parameters... I don't think it's as clever as the techniques in this paper, however.
GHC (the main Haskell compiler at this point) does some extremely amazing stuff on the compiler front, it is probably at the forefront of static analysis. And the Haskell community is extremely motivated to making amazing machinery.
A lot of Haskell stuff is based around its lazy evaluation model though