speed...

[James Hague]

> The thing I am wondering about is the performance of Clean
> 
> 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.

Well, IMO, the Clean team simply gave the highest priority to 
ultimate performance.  Ironically, Clean is one of the more complex 
and ugly functional languages, as it's loaded with all kinds of 
manual annotations for strictness and uniqueness and so on.

James