VictorTaelin here. It won't show a speedup because you already optimized it to a low level algorithm manually! The point of that benchmark is to stress-test the cost of overwhelming abstraction. What is really notable is that addition by repeated increment on HVM performs as well as addition with a carry bit. The former is an elegant one-liner, the later is a 8-cases error prone recursive definition. The point is to show how you can often write highly abstract, elegant mathematical definitions, and it will perform as well as a manually crafted version, and that is very cool.