OCaml and speed
The OCaml tutorial chapter 11 is quite interesting.
Why is OCaml fast? Indeed, step back and ask is OCaml fast? How can we make programs faster? In this chapter we'll look at what actually happens when you compile your OCaml programs down to machine code. This will help in understanding why OCaml is not just a great language for programming, but is also a very fast language indeed. And it'll help you to help the compiler write better machine code for you. It's also (I believe anyway) a good thing for programmers to have some idea of what happens between you typing ocamlopt and getting a binary you can run.
(referenced in Andrew Birkett's
blog)