speed...

[Rob]

I was interested if anyone has any opinions about the following.

I was looking through  for the language shootout because I was thinking 
about learning "D" (D and erlang hold a similar attraction for me) and 
wanted some programs to start with. I was happy to see that the newest 
round of "benchmarks" includes a new test where erlang starts to shine 
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=message&lang=all&sort=cpu
Although they will probably not ramp the test up to where erlang is 
strongest since most other languages will start to fail at less than 
5000 threads.

The thing I am wondering about is the performance of Clean
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=clean&sort=cpu

I don't understand why a small, relatively obscure functional language 
could surpass the performance of compilers that have had massive amounts 
of academic and industry scrutiny, testing and tuning over a period of 
(in some cases) decades. For version 2.1 of Clean they have re-written 
their compiler in Clean, is it that function languages are that much 
superior for compilers?

I am thinking that I'd like to use some Clean functions for some serial 
processing within the context of an erlang program that does all the 
concurrency management - Any opinions about something like that?

TIA,

Rob

PS I noticed their erlang fasta program is failing:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/sandbox/benchmark.php?test=fasta&lang=erlang&sort=cpu