The 2006 edition of the ICFP programming contest, one of the most enjoyable to date, introduced the Universal Machine used by a fictional society to program around 200 BC. Many people have tried their had at implementing the UM in a variety of languages. This table lists several C, C++ and Haskell implementations.
Even though it is clearly hard to beat C speed-wise here, high-level, functional programming languages like Haskell or OCaml can come quite close in spite of the very low-level nature of the problem. I'm getting 75% of C's performance (1m21s vs. 1m for the "SANDmark" benchmark on a 3GHz AMD64) in OCaml with straightforward code that performs array bound checking (i.e., unlike the other implementations, malicious machine images cannot take over the process). This makes it faster than the best performing C++ implementation on this table, and comparable to other C implementations; obviously, this says more about the C++ implementations than about the language itself, but it shows that they're all in the same league. (BTW, Haskell has improved a lot since GHC 6.5: the "ugly, fast" Fast.hs is only 2.25 times slower than edwardk.c with 6.8.2, and a bit worse with 6.10.3: 2m18s = 2.3X; um6.hs, less harmful to the eye, is 5.5X slower than edwardk.c with 6.10.3, though --- virtually the same as GHC 6.5. I had to change a few lines of code as some APIs have changed since.)
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