"The same mistake is done on the Computer Language Benchmark Game. There's an Array sorting benchmark where Haskell just blows away even hand-optimized C. The secret is that the benchmark never prints out the contents of the sorted array. The C compiler isn't smart enough to recognize that the array is never actually used anywhere, but Haskell is, and so the entire benchmark basically compiles down to the equivalent of "int main() { return 0; }"."
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This had me laughing out loud:
"The same mistake is done on the Computer Language Benchmark Game. There's an Array sorting benchmark where Haskell just blows away even hand-optimized C. The secret is that the benchmark never prints out the contents of the sorted array. The C compiler isn't smart enough to recognize that the array is never actually used anywhere, but Haskell is, and so the entire benchmark basically compiles down to the equivalent of "int main() { return 0; }"."