Machine learning in OCaml or Haskell?

Question

I\'m hoping to use either Haskell or OCaml on a new project because R is too slow. I need to be able to use support vectory machines, ideally separating out each execution to r

Answer 1

If speed is your prime concern then go for C. Haskell is pretty good performance wise but you are never going to get as fast as C. To my knowledge the only functional language that has bettered C in a benchmark is Stalin Scheme but that is very old and nobody really knows how it works.

I've written genetic programming libraries where performance was key and I wrote it in a functional style in C. The functional style allowed me to easily parallelise it using OMP and it scales linearly upto 8 cores within a single process. You certainly can't do that in OCaml although Haskell is improving all the time with regards to concurrency and parallelism.

The downside of using C was that it took me months to finally find all the bugs and stop the core dumps which was extremely challenging because of the concurrency. Haskell would probably have caught 90% of those bugs on the first compilation.

So speed at any cost ? Looking back I'd wish I'd used Haskell as I could stand it to be 2 - 3 times slower if I'd saved over a month in development time.