It's always funny to look at benchmarks made by amateurs. We get it all the
time in parallel computing, when some sharp programmer decides to implement
a parallel algorithm in Java. :) I keep asking myself questions like do you
also program ciphers in Flash? Graph algorithms in PHP?

In my experience, ocaml is pretty fast, quite comparable to C++, for
computation-intensive tasks and of course excellent at traditional
functional programming tasks. Since I use both kinds of algorithms in my
research, ocaml is better than C++ for me (despite the great boost libs),
except for shared memory parallelism, which is still non-existent in ocaml.

Try implementing something that has a large time/memory complexity like a
data mining algorithm, and you'll see the difference from Haskell/Java/Blah.
Just run the algorithms in Weka, the famous data mining suite written in
Java, and compare them to any sensible implementation of the same
algorithms. Measure the difference, it's unbelievable how awful Java is at
any kind of serious computing! I think some conservative humans from the
future sent the designers of Java back in time to stop the singularity.

Cheers,

-- 
Eray Ozkural, PhD candidate.  Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ai-philosophy
http://myspace.com/arizanesil http://myspace.com/malfunct