Re: [Caml-list] Correct way of programming a CGI script

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@janestcapital.com>]

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skaller wrote:

>On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 18:04 +0200, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>I heard that OCaml is particularly slow (and probably
>>>memory-inefficient) when it comes to string manipulation.
>>>      
>>>
>>No, this is nonsense. Of course, you can slow everything down by using
>>strings in an inappropriate way, like
>>
>>let rec concat_list l =
>>  match l with
>>    [] -> ""
>>  | s :: l' -> s ^ concat_list l'
>>    
>>
>
>Now Gerd, I would not call the claim nonsense. If you can't
>use a data structure in a natural way, I'd say the claim indeed
>has some weight.
>
>The example above is ugly because it isn't tail recursive.
>If you consider an imperative loop to concat the strings
>in an array
>
>	let s = ref "" in
>	for i = 0 to Array.length a do
>		s := !s ^ a.[i]
>	done;
>
>then Ocaml is likely to do this slowly. C++ on the other
>hand will probably do this faster, especially if you reserve
>enough storage first.
>  
>

And if you don't, and thus have to repeatedly allocate more memory, C++ 
is likely going to be slower than Ocaml (poor allocation performance).  
In fact, I'm willing to bet you can get near C++ speed by doing things 
in the C++ way- allocate the string once (with enough space), and then 
use String.blit to fill it in.

That said, there are better implementations of strings for Ocaml.  So 
what?  Ocaml isn't a string processing language.  Yeah, there are things 
which are probably better done in Perl/Python/Ruby.  A language doesn't 
have to be the perfect language for all purposes in order to be a good 
language- in fact, in my experience languages that try to be everything 
to everybody end up being useless for all purposes (C++ being example #1 
here).

Brian


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