> I believe that the Stalin compiler for Scheme, which is a whole program
> compiler (you give up separate compilation) has done better than C on some 
> much more significant programs than fibonacci. I suspect that any compiler 
> which abandons separate compilation and does aggressive whole program
> analysis may have problems with extremely large programs, but I don't have 
> evidence to back this up. 
> 
> I presume that a similar compiler for an ML variant could be written. Given 
> that the Caml team has limited resources, I'd rather they spend them
> elsewhere, as I am satisfied with the performance of OCaml for the problems 
> I apply it to. I realize that others have different priorities.

In fact, researchers at NECI have developed a whole-program Standard ML
compiler, called MLton.  You can read about it at

http://external.nj.nec.com/PLS/MLton/

In general, its programs run 2-3x faster than SML/NJ, but occasionally they
are a bit slower.

Mike

-- 
Michael Hicks
Ph.D. Candidate, the University of Pennsylvania
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mwh            mailto://mwh@dsl.cis.upenn.edu
"Every time someone asks me to do something, I ask if they want French
 fries with that." -- testimonial of a former McDonald's employee