The "speed" of Clean

[Mark E. Hall]

The discussion on Open Source has certainly brought a surge of activity
to this list, and provided a lot of enjoyable reading. I will resist the
temptation to add my own comments, but I would like to ask a question
that has been brought back to mind by several of the contributions:

There have been several remarks made about the "speed" of Clean, versus
that of other functional and proceedural languages. In fact, I was first
drawn to Clean by the blurb on the University of Nottingham's FAQ page
(http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/gmh/faq.html) which said that
Clean was "one of the fastest implementations of functional languages
available at the time of writing". I have always assumed that this
refered to the execution speed of the code produced by the compiler,
but recent comments refering to the "speed of the compiler", and claims
that Clean is about as fast as GCC have raised some doubts about whether
I am interpreting this correctly. Could someone please enlighten me?
When discussing the "speed" of Clean, and comparing it to the "speed"
of other languages, are people refering to the execution speed of the
generated code, or are they refering to something else? This is important
to me, because I am thinking of starting a project in which the execution
speed is very important; in particular, if Clean really can produce code
that runs about as fast as the code produced by GCC, then my project
becomes much more realistic. (Of course, it seems to me that it would
be very difficult to compare the execution speed of programs written in
Clean and in C, because of the vast differences between the two languages.)

Mark

________________________________________________________________________________

                                  Mark E. Hall
                      Mahanakorn University of Technology
                          Vanit Building 2, 8th Floor
                           1126/1 New Petchburi Road
                            Bangkok 10400, Thailand
                                66-2-6553181--7
                                mehall@mut.ac.th