title: Are functional languages inherently slow?
body: <p>Why are functional languages always tailing behind C in benchmarks?  If you have a statically typed functional language, it seems to me it could be compiled to the same code as C, or to even more optimized code since more semantics are available to the compiler.  Why does it seem like all functional languages are slower than C, and why do they always need garbage collection and excessive use of the heap?</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know of a functional language appropriate for embedded / real-time applications, where memory allocation is kept to a minimum and the produced machine code is lean and fast?</p>