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Asked: 2026-05-14T18:19:00+00:00

I am curious as to how F# performance compares to C++ performance? I asked

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I am curious as to how F# performance compares to C++ performance? I asked a similar question with regards to Java, and the impression I got was that Java is not suitable for heavy numbercrunching.

I have read that F# is supposed to be more scalable and more performant, but how is this real-world performance compares to C++? specific questions about current implementation are:

  • How well does it do floating-point?
  • Does it allow vector instructions
  • how friendly is it towards optimizing
    compilers?
  • How big a memory foot print does it have? Does it allow fine-grained control over memory locality?
  • does it have capacity for distributed
    memory processors, for example Cray?
  • what features does it have that may be of interest to computational science where heavy number processing is involved?
  • Are there actual scientific computing
    implementations that use it?

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    • F# does floating point computation as fast as the .NET CLR will allow it. Not much difference from C# or other .NET languages.
    • F# does not allow vector instructions by itself, but if your CLR has an API for these, F# should not have problems using it. See for instance Mono.
    • As far as I know, there is only one F# compiler for the moment, so maybe the question should be “how good is the F# compiler when it comes to optimisation?”. The answer is in any case “potentially as good as the C# compiler, probably a little bit worse at the moment”. Note that F# differs from e.g. C# in its support for inlining at compile time, which potentially allows for more efficient code which rely on generics.
    • Memory foot prints of F# programs are similar to that of other .NET languages. The amount of control you have over allocation and garbage collection is the same as in other .NET languages.
    • I don’t know about the support for distributed memory.
    • F# has very nice primitives for dealing with flat data structures, e.g. arrays and lists. Look for instance at the content of the Array module: map, map2, mapi, iter, fold, zip… Arrays are popular in scientific computing, I guess due to their inherently good memory locality properties.
    • For scientific computation packages using F#, you may want to look at what Jon Harrop is doing.
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