Wes Felter (wesley@felter.org) on 3/4/08 wrote:
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>Patrik Hägglund (patrik.hagglund@bredband.net) on 3/4/08 wrote:
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>
>>I belive that it is possible to continue that path. I.e. to design programming
>>languages that incorporate both language contructs that today is associated with
>>HLL languages, and at the same time retain the effeciency of executed code to be
>>on par with using raw assembly (or C) programming.
>>
>>Is anybody aware of other recent languages, having this design goal?
>
>OCaml?

Well, I probably should study Caml, and its implementation OCaml, more carefully. Caml is a very interesting language. But as far as I understand, when it comes to efficency, Caml is only a halfhearted attempt. From the beginning, it was not designed to be on par with the efficiency of C. (But at least it included destructive updates, despite beeing a functional languages.)

In this post from 2003, some benchmarks executed at about 50% of the speed of C++, and the discussion seems to reveal that 100% was not a goal:

http://lwn.net/Articles/19378/

Today, OCaml may even be close to 100%, due to compiler improvements. But for me, close is not enough ;). I think efficiency has to be a top priority form the beginning when designing the language. Otherwise, despite heroic efforts in the compiler implementation, you always end up with corner cases, not being as efficient as in other languages.