A while ago I started up with Haskell in an effort to figure out what this functional programming was all about. One of the simple tests I did was try to find the maximum of a list of numbers and time it. This led me down an interesting rabbit hole, documented here.

I’ve now started with Racket in earnest (and am documenting it here). The corresponding test for Racket – the maximum of a list of a million numbers – is as follows:

#lang racket
(define a (build-list 1000000 values))
(time (apply max a))

And gives a respectable 92ms running time, 70ms of which is garbage collection. To recap, the corresponding performances for Python was 20ms and 2ms for C. Haskell’s performance was, well, confusing.