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<p class=MsoNormal>I find myself writing real-time (“soft”
real-time) communications and data manipulation code a fair bit, and before I
discovered Erlang, I had written a whole set of concurrency and scheduling libraries
to assist me. When I discovered Erlang, I thought I had hit upon exactly
what I needed (I wished I had known about Erlang four years ago!). I have
therefore started to teach myself Erlang.</p>
<p class=MsoNormal> </p>
<p class=MsoNormal>However, I was taken aback by the benchmark comparison (<a
href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ghc&lang2=hipe">http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ghc&lang2=hipe</a>),
which shows Haskell to perform every bit as well as Erlang. Since Erlang
and Haskell seem to have a lot in common, I am now wondering if I should instead
teach myself Haskell. Now, granted, this will be a biased group to ask,
but I am curious as to what the Erlang community’s take on Haskell’s
apparent performance superiority is. It seems to me that Erlang as a
language seems to fit very nicely into my needs, but given Haskell’s
similarity and superior performance, does anyone have any experience with both
who could help me in my decision?</p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>I have written some prototype modules in Erlang, but have
never written anything in Haskell, and am wondering whether to stop and play
around with Haskell some before I continue. Please advise.
Thank-you.</p>
<p class=MsoNormal> </p>
<p class=MsoNormal>David Mercer</p>
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