Clojure isn’t the fastest functional lanuage — that title seems to go to Haskell these days, at least for the stuff that I do — but it nonetheless is usually fast enough. It’s a dynamic language, so is perhaps cursed to be somewhat slower always, but nonetheless for the things that I do, it seems [...]

Ran into another interesting performance problem while converting a small test program over to Haskell. Let’s say that you want to walk through every line of a text file, collate character frequencies, and return anything that maps to a particular frequency. For purposes of explanation we’ll do something really silly like look for lines with [...]

I was trying to track down some issues with some text processing programs that I was writing in Haskell, and ran into an interesting problem. I made one small change and my program ended up being 5 times slower, and I had to backtrack to try and find out what it was. So, given a [...]