OCaml vs. C++ for Dynamic Programming

jcr13 writes "OCaml is nearly as fast (or sometimes even faster) than C, right? At least according to the Computer Language Shootout [alternate] (OCaml supporters often point to these shootout results). My results on a real-world programming problem (optimizing a garden layout using dynamic programming) disagree. On one particular problem instance (a garden of size 7x3), my C++ implementation finished in 1 second, while the OCaml implementation was still running after 16 minutes. Bear in mind that my OCaml implementation was dramatically faster than my equivalent Haskell code. It seems that if you program using a functional style in OCaml (which I did, using map, filter, and other recursive structures in place of loops), it is quite slow. However, most of the shootout OCaml programs rely heavily on OCaml's imperative features (unlike Haskell, OCaml doesn't force you to be a functional purist). If you write OCaml code that is isomorphic to C code, it will be fast---what about if you use OCaml the way it was meant to be used?"

Comments

Other languages...

[jd]

D is supposedly superior in almost every regard to C++. There is a D interface to GCC produced by a third-party. It's not tested in the shootout, but the reference implementation of D (which is stand-alone) is.

Occam is probably the most scalable language out there, as it was designed for massively parallel systems.

There's a PL/I interface to GCC. I dare someone to write a Gnome or KDE interface for it...