On paper they are efficient. In practise, all pointer based data structures (linked lists, binary trees, etc) are slow on modern hardware. And this effect is more important than the complexity in practise for most practical high performance code.
You are far better off with linear access where possible (e.g. vectors, open addressing hash maps) or if you must have a tree, make the fan-out factor as large as possible (e.g. btrees rather than binary trees).
Now, I don’t know if Haskell etc affords you such control, I mainly code in Rust (and C++ in the past).
On paper they are efficient. In practise, all pointer based data structures (linked lists, binary trees, etc) are slow on modern hardware. And this effect is more important than the complexity in practise for most practical high performance code.
You are far better off with linear access where possible (e.g. vectors, open addressing hash maps) or if you must have a tree, make the fan-out factor as large as possible (e.g. btrees rather than binary trees).
Now, I don’t know if Haskell etc affords you such control, I mainly code in Rust (and C++ in the past).
Also see this old thread from 2016 on hacker news about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263275