Re: [Caml-list] Comparison of OCaml and MLton for numerics

[skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 13:49 +0200, David MENTRE wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 2007/6/1, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@cs.cornell.edu>:
> > In other words,
> > factoring out with functors and modules is good style, but OCaml penalizes
> > you for it.
> 
> A naive and somewhat provocative question: is the performance penalty
> a real issue in your production code or just a known overhead that is
> easily solved by having a more powerful computer? 

Many calculations such as financial option pricing have 
performance exponential in lookahead time. These calculations are run 
regularly with varying parameters.

Being able to run the calculations with twice the number of 
parameter values in an overnight run is valuable, and gives
the finance house an edge over their competitors.

Paying 4 times more dollars for a CPU that is twice as fast is a 
very expensive solution compared to an optimising compiler ..
and if you paid this money you'd be even MORE inclined to want
to use optimised software to get best use out of your investment.

So, in my opinion .. yes, performance matters, and faster CPUs
don't really help. However the choice of a good language like
Ocaml is also made on the basis of programmer performance,
not just run time performance (otherwise Jane St would be writing
everything in assembler .. :)

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net