dburrows/ blog/ entry/ from-blogspot/ How much speed are you
willing to give up for pretty code?  After experimenting a bit
with Haskell and using it for some toy projects, I decided to
see if there was any chance it could be used for a non-toy task;
i.e., one where it might one day be necessary to actually have
fast code. As a proxy for this, I decided to try a very simple
task: counting the number of lines in a file. As input, I
generated a file with a million lines of random data and an
average of 40 bytes per line; all the Haskell programs were
compiled with the current GHC in Debian unstable and with
optimizations enabled.  The baseline is, of course, our friend
"wc":  real    0m0.084s user    0m0.043s sys     0m0.040s  (this
and all other timing data was taken after "cat /tmp/testwc.txt >
/dev/null" to ensure that the file was cached) Now, it's
probably too much to hope that a Haskell program will run as
fast as a C program does, since the C program can run in a tight
loop. But it seems reasonable that