Comparing two functional programming systems

Abstract

A technique is presented for comparing the performance of functional languages with different evaluation strategies running on different machines. A set of small benchmarks is used, and the execution times of these programs running in the functional language and in the implementation language of the functional system are compared. The ratio of these execution times measured how well the functional system used the resources of the underlying hardware and implementation language. Also two functional programming systems are described. One system is a graph reduction interpreter for lambda calculus. The other is a DEL-style intermediate instruction set architecture for FP. The benchmarks in FP and the performances of the two systems on these benchmarks are presented.