The Haskell programmers should really ask themselves how to get closer to C/C++ in speed - especially since the Haskell language implementations (GHC!) are mostly static and code is usually statically compiled - just like C and C++. If Haskell compilers generate slower code or user code is slow, Haskell users have little excuse, only poorer tools and/or poorer code.
Obviously Haskell could improve, but can it be as fast as C? How do you shave the last bit of overhead of type safety and strictness?
I thought type safety in Haskell is a compile time thing? Where are the runtime costs?
Then I thought that non-strictness (!), non-mutability of data and referential transparency offer all kinds of possibilities for optimizations done by the compiler?
But maybe the 'interesting research' done in the Haskell community is more into fancy type system features that get the author a PhD and not so much into compiler optimizations?
Obviously Haskell could improve, but can it be as fast as C? How do you shave the last bit of overhead of type safety and strictness?