> binary-trees uses artificial strictness for the sake of the benchmark
Using strict evaluation when appropriate is most certainly idiomatic Haskell code.
> Nine of the ten Haskell implementations are demonstrations of writing C in Haskell (without reaching C's performance).
This (C in Haskell accusation) is debatable, though I'm not sure there's much to be gained even given a totally successful discussion where we both communicate our points 100% effectively.
Mutability and strictness aren't a disservice to Haskell. They're both considered to be things which are available as choices and should be taken when needed. In particular, the entire ST monad is all about mutability and is very well behaved.
Furthermore, even if you write nearly everything in the IO monad Haskell you'll gain a lot from the type system and from easily peeling out small, meaningful pure segments.
>fannkuch-redux heavily utilizes unsafe operations on a mutable vector.
They are just not bounds checked. That is not "writing C in Haskell".
>binary-trees uses artificial strictness for the sake of the benchmark
What on earth is "artificial strictness"? Forcing evaluation when you need something to be evaluated immediately is not artificial, not unidiomatic, and not "writing C in Haskell".
>Nine of the ten Haskell implementations are demonstrations of writing C in Haskell
And end up shorter than rust? The idea that writing lower level code is "writing C in haskell" is nonsense, the ability to write more verbose but faster code is not harmful, it is useful. But the fact that lower level haskell is still shorter than rust and yet you want to act like it is some sort of horrible thing makes it hard to believe that you are really concerned about the horrors of writing slightly more verbose code.
The Rust code is both safer and faster at the cost of more keystrokes.
I'm not certain the point of writing unsafe code in Haskell when there are better tools for the job. Haskell is fast enough as is and using it to hammer screws just reeks of wrong tool for the job.
As an aside, if your interested in safer and faster I'm benchmarking some of the ATS2 code examples[0] which were created for (but not yet in[1][2]) the computer language benchmarks game. It seems to beat C and C++ in some (many?) cases and create TINY binaries. I was trying to benchmark all the examples but got tired of doing it ;) Here are a couple anyway:
Pidigits:
$ patscc -I/home/cody/sources/ATS-Postiats-contrib/contrib -pipe -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=native pidigits.dats -o bin/pidigits.ats_run -lgmp
$ gcc -pipe -Wall -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=native pidigits.c -o bin/pidigits.gcc_run -lgmp
$ time ./bin/pidigits.gcc_run 10000 > /dev/null
real 0m0.969s
user 0m0.963s
sys 0m0.004s
$ time ./bin/pidigits.ats_run 10000 > /dev/null
real 0m0.972s
user 0m0.968s
sys 0m0.004s
$ ls -larth bin/pidigits.*
-rwxrwxr-x 1 cody cody 15K Dec 13 18:59 bin/pidigits.ats_run
-rwxrwxr-x 1 cody cody 14K Dec 13 18:59 bin/pidigits.gcc_run
k-nucleotide:
$ g++ -c -pipe -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=native -std=c++0x k-nucleotide_gpp3.c++
$ $(PATSCC) -DATS_MEMALLOC_LIBC -pipe -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=native -std=c99 k-nucleotide.dats
$ patscc -DATS_MEMALLOC_LIBC -pipe -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=native -std=c99 k-nucleotide.dats
$ time ./k-nucleotide_gpp3 < ~/Downloads/knucleotide-input.txt
real 0m0.177s
user 0m0.300s
sys 0m0.055s
$ time ./k-nucleotide < ~/Downloads/knucleotide-input.txt
real 0m0.056s
user 0m0.036s
sys 0m0.020s
$ ls -larth k-nucleotide k-nucleotide_gpp3
-rwxrwxr-x 1 cody cody 38K Dec 13 19:07 k-nucleotide
-rwxrwxr-x 1 cody cody 96K Dec 13 19:07 k-nucleotide_gpp3
Your comment says absolutely nothing, and that appears to be the goal. What is the point of writing any code in any language? It is a benchmark, the point of it is to write the fastest code you can. You aren't obligated to write lower level code in haskell, nobody has a gun to your head. So why do you pretend it is a problem, and claim other languages are "better tools" for that job despite haskell clearly being very good at that job?
It doesn't exclude "idiomatic" versions, but the data is presented so as to make them useless. How do I compare "idiomatic" rust to "idiomatic" haskell? All you can get is "here's the fastest versions from each language". If you want to compare any other version you have to do it on an individual basis, one at a time. So there's absolutely no reason for people to bother adding "idiomatic" versions.
"Idiomatic" in whose opinion? "Idiomatic" is a slogan not a well-defined property.
The reason for people to bother adding "idiomatic" versions, is that other people really do work through looking at the source code "on an individual basis, one at a time."
This exact thread came up last year when we started talking about the shootout and haskell. And Its always the same people who bring up the shootout and defend the existing entries.
Please stop bringing up the shootout (esp when haskell is mentioned) and dragging everyone through this conversation again.
Benchmarks are great to debate but this one is causing more harm than good; let's talk about other benchmarks.
That's the point I'm making. People constantly dismiss the results they don't like as "unidiomatic" and embrace they ones they do as "idiomatic".
>is that other people really do work through looking at the source code "on an individual basis, one at a time."
Except that people don't bother adding them, so your reasoning for why isn't relevant. If you want to claim the shootout is useful for this, you need to allow for grouping benchmarks together to be presented against the "standard" ones. Let Bob and Sally submit "Bob and Sally version of Foo benchmarks" and let me compare them against Foo and against other languages.
fannkuch-redux pidigits binary-trees