[Shootout-list] Safety vs. speed

[Peter Hinely]

Hi,

> I've thought things like this overflow issue, string buffer
> overruns, and so forth would be good things to
> highlight in the shootout.

I think it would be good to have a column on the shootout indicating
whether the entry is "safe" or not.

Unfortunately there are different kinds of safety, i.e. type safety,
array access (bounds checking) safety, bignum integer safety, so it's
going to be hard to boil all these aspects down to just one column.

I noticed the Lisp entries are compiled with safety 0.  (no type
checking, bounds checking, or bignums).

Are the Haskell, ML entries, etc. entries safe?  I had assumed so, but now
I'm not so sure.  I don't know enough about those languages to know.
Looking on the web, I see that most of those languages at least have the
option of turning off bounds checking, or using primitive modules that
lack bounds checking.

Regards,
Peter