

Scala 2.9 vs 2.10 Performance - bertzzie
http://markehammons.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/2-10-performance/

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tikhonj
This isn't the most compelling of benchmarks. It's still infinitely better
than what most people do--the author actually measured something in a
reasonable way!--but I don't think it's enough to make any interesting
conclusions. I suppose it shows that there _is_ a performance boost, which is
great, but I'd really like to know where the gains really are.

Could somebody familiar with the changes to 2.10 explain where the performance
boost came from and what code it will affect? Does this make Scala a more
compelling choice for the discerning functional programmer?

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gtani
It's incomplete reporting without the JRE heap, inlining, GC and other options
used and some kind of residency and median memory usage data. Also, warmups,
hardware and OS (Windows seems to frequently produce interesting results. (I
haven't seen a GC testbench for java like dons' gc-tune pkg for haskell, but
that would be a great tool

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jaytaylor
Performance improvements are nice and all, but I'm already generally satisfied
with the performance of Scala 2.8.x and 2.9.x.

What I'd really like to see is faster compile times. I know it's a tall order
given the complexity of implicits, but compared to other languages Scala
compilation slowness can be a tough sell.

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eropple
Performance improvements are really important given the rise of poor JVMs like
Dalvik, though. Scala is really painful on Dalvik due to the amount of garbage
it generates.

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seanmcdirmid
I wouldn't call Dalvik a poor JVM, just a JVM optimized for a certain mobile
application mix (not so GC intensive) that Scala doesn't really support yet.

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eropple
Can you name an X for which Dalvik performs competitively with HotSpot? Honest
question, because I can't think of one.

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laureny
This comparison makes no sense, the two JVM's were designed with fundamentally
different goals.

At any rate, if you really wanted to compare, you would have to run the
benchmarks on the same platform, i.e. Dalvik on the desktop or HotSpot on
Android.

Which makes no sense either.

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eropple
_This comparison makes no sense, the two JVM's were designed with
fundamentally different goals._

What they are designed for and what they are quite commonly used for are
different things. Both are used for running my application code. Serious
performance problems on one makes that _worse_ , regardless of whether it is
worse-as-designed or not.

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alexjarvis
Nice post, I just used your benchmark to also compare running Scala in JDK 6
and 7 <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4862035>

