Don Stewart recently wrote a blog comparing the time it took to compute Fibonacci numbers in Ruby, Python and Haskell, according to his results Haskell blew away the competition.
Here are HIS results
Ruby (1.8.5) 64.26s
Python (2.4) 25.16s
Haskell (GHC 6.8) 0.48s
Parallel Haskell (GHC 6.8) 0.42s
Since I am learning Erlang I wanted to see how Erlang does (please note I am a Erlang newbie) so here goes !
The Code
-module(fib).
-export([fib/1,for/2,start/0]).
fib(0) -> 0;
fib(1) -> 1;
fib(N) -> fib(N-1) + fib(N-2).
for(N,N) -> [fib(N)];
for(I,N) -> [fib(I)|for(I+1,N)].
start() -> timer:tc(?MODULE,for,[1,35]).
And the results
{3018587,
[1,
1,
2,
3,
5,
8,
13,
21,
34,
55,
89,
144,
233,
377,
610,
987,
1597,
2584,
4181,
6765,
10946,
17711,
28657,
46368,
75025,
121393,
196418|...]}
2>
That is 3.02 seconds, though not as good as Haskell, it still blew away Ruby and Python. Hey Erlang gurus out there is there any way we can seed this up ?
Devender's Musings 
Fare.
Parallelize it? 🙂
Here’s a faster version of fib:
fib(0) -> 0;
fib(1) -> 1;
fib(N) when N > 1 -> fib(N-2, 1, 0).
fib(0, OneBack, TwoBack) -> OneBack + TwoBack;
fib(N, OneBack, TwoBack) -> fib(N-1, OneBack + TwoBack, OneBack).
That version took 62 milliseconds to run:
start() -> timer:tc(?MODULE,for,[1,1000]).
on my machine.