Le Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 02:04:44PM +0000, Sarah Mount écrivait/wrote:
> Informal benchmarks (Doug Bagley, Jon Harrop, ...) of OCaml code
> against other languages seem to suggest that Ocaml code performs about
> as well as C++ code in many cases. Does anyone know of any published
> (as in dead-tree) work that might confirm/deny this?

I don't believe this question has a precise, practical answer.

We all know (by experience) that Ocaml performs quite well. We also
know that for most (but not all) of the software we are coding, the
cost and time of development does significantly matter, and a 10%
decrease in performance is not that important, hence Ocaml brings a
real win.

A real answer would be to have a team of programmers fluent in Ocaml
write a code (an real-sized application of hundreds of KLOC of source
code, representing several man-years of effort) which has exactly the
same precise specification than an existing code written in C. But
this will never happen (it is too costly but quite useless an
experiment). For example, nobody will recode in Ocaml an exact clone
of gcc-4.1, firefox-1.5, or mysql-5.0!


I don't even know about big-sized Ocaml applications which have C++
written competitors....

Why do you need more than the informal benchmarks, and your personal
experience?


Maybe a related question is "why corporations (or professionals) are
switching from C++ to Ocaml" but this is a question that won't be (for
social and political reasons easy to guess) easily and really
answered.

Is your real question: "help me to convince my boss to let me code in
OCaml"?

Regards.


-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net 
aliases: basile<at>tunes<dot>org = bstarynk<at>nerim<dot>net
8, rue de la Faïencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France