On Thursday 10 February 2005 15:15, Christian Szegedy wrote:
> Let us look at another example where ocaml not really shines:
> ...

I brought this up a while ago. IIRC, performance is poor here because of:

1. Run-time polymorphism in Array.init.
2. Blitting the array twice (once for initialisation, once for filling).

I believe the former could be fixed by running source through a whole-program 
preprocessor to remove all polymorphism.

The latter could be addressed by extending the functionality of the GC to 
permit extensible arrays. However, this is tricky, error-prone work on a 
safety-critical part of the compiler.

PS: Note that this is not a test of "memory allocation" as you state but, 
rather, it is mainly a test of the cost of run-time polymorphism. Remove the 
polymorphism for a better test of memory allocation.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.