Pseudoknot: A Float-Intensive Benchmark for Functional Compilers

Over 20 implementations of different functional languages are compared using one program. Aspects studied are compile time and execution time. Another important point is how the program can be modified and tuned to obtain maximal performance on each language implementation. Finally, an interesting question is whether laziness is or is not beneficial for this application. With few exceptions, the compilers take a long time to compile this program. Compilers that generate C or Lisp are much slower than those that generate native code directly. Interestingly, there is no clear distinction between the runtime performance of eager and lazy implementations when appropriate annotations are used: lazy implementations have clearly come of age for this application. The speed of C can even be approached by some implementations, but not without special measures such as strictness annotations. No implementation that has been tested actually equals the performance