Hopac claims that its Jobs are much more lightweight that F# Asyncs. There are many benchmarks on Hopac github repository, but I wanted to make a simple and straightforward benchmark and what could be simpler that parallel Fibonacci algorithm? :) (actually there's a more comprehensive  benchmark in the Hopac repository itself, see Fibonacci.fs)Sequential Fibonacci function is usually defined asSo write a parallel version in Hopac where each step is performed in a Job and all these Jobs are (potentially) ru[...]

I've to say, D is very interesting language with several unique features. What about performance? How it compares to VM-based languages?It took 3.6 seconds in debug mode and 1.3 seconds in release mode, which is on pair with F#.F# - 1.26D - 1.3C# - 1.4Haskell - 2.8Nemerle - 5Clojure - 9Erlang - 17Ruby - 60Python - 120

Recently I started to learn Scala (for about 2 weeks now). Here is prons and cons so far (note: I've not written any serious code yet, just have read "Scala for the impatient" and now reading "Programming in Scala" by Odersky): PronsPassing not evaluated block as argument ("by-name arguments". Allows to develop better DSLs)Macros!There are few libraries written with macros, impossible to implement in a language like c# or f# (MacWire etc.)ConsNo not-nullable types (this is a huge one)Not whitespace sensiti[...]

Some time ago I compared F# and Haskell STM implementation performance. Today I'm adding Scala into it: So, it's more than two times slower than Haskell, but more than 3 times faster than F#. Interesting.

Scala keeps surprising me. It has much good stuff that F# has. For example, I believed that statically resolved type parameters are unique to F#. Turns out this is not the case. Scala has equivalent feature called "structural types". It has nice syntax compared to F#'s statically resolved type parameters. However, it uses reflection under the hood while F# uses inlining to instantiate functions in-place at compile time. This approach should definitely have awful performance characteristics. Surprisingly, i[...]