

The speed, size and dependability of programming languages - known
http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of-v1.html

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khafra
The original discussion here included the study's author:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634692>

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jcl
Interesting: The Shootout has since added language scatter plots thanks to
this article:

<http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/shapes.php>

(Isaac Gouy, the Shootout's maintainer, appears in the article's comments.)

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stcredzero
One thing you have to say about the benchmark game: it is a good measure of
how fast _naive_ code runs. If your field is something like genetics, you
don't want to have to know the internals of your JIT compiler to get fast
code. You just want to do genetics.

~~~
jongraehl
When it comes to fine distinctions, the game is a sad joke.

It's an arms race toward writing nearly machine-language code as best your
language supports it.

There are Haskell programs that are doing a significant amount of work as
essentially "peek" and "poke" inside a memory buffer.

There are Java programs that use variables q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z rather than two
arrays of size 5.

I guess if you have a legitimate need for getting the most performance on some
_fixed_ task (and abstraction, readability, and extensibility can all be
sacrificed), without using a call to C, then both are fair.

