From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id JAA03222; Fri, 18 Jun 2004 09:56:42 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA03211 for ; Fri, 18 Jun 2004 09:56:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from will.iki.fi (will.iki.fi [217.169.64.20]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i5I7udSH020035 for ; Fri, 18 Jun 2004 09:56:40 +0200 Received: from [10.0.20.56] (fa-3-0-0.fw.exomi.com [217.169.64.99]) by will.iki.fi (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3790F11B; Fri, 18 Jun 2004 10:56:39 +0300 (EEST) In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v618) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Message-Id: <06D9583C-C0FD-11D8-8AC7-000393863F70@exomi.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Ocaml Mailing List From: Ville-Pertti Keinonen Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Great Programming Language Shootout Revived Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 10:56:38 +0300 To: Brian Hurt X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.618) X-Miltered: at concorde with ID 40D2A037.000 by Joe's j-chkmail (http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr)! X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; caml-list:01 shootout:01 damned:01 ocaml's:01 mlton:01 ltu:99 mlton:01 scorecard:01 bug:01 totals:99 shootout:01 misleading:01 anyhow:01 ocaml:01 ocaml:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Jun 17, 2004, at 9:05 PM, Brian Hurt wrote: > board is pretty damned good- we're beating both Java and C++ across the > board, in fact the only other language that comes close to Ocaml's > performance is, unsurprisingly, version of SML- MLton and SML/NJ). > But if I looked at it a bit earlier (when it was posted on LtU), and MLton and SML/NJ were both ahead of OCaml in the overall scorecard for CPU. There was probably a bug in computing the totals, as the raw scores don't seem to have changed. Anyhow, the shootout seems, like most benchmarks, to be misleading and arbitrary. The language features compared are not really equivalent. E.g. C, C++ and Ada should be approximately the same in performance for code that doesn't compare their libraries or exception models. Despite doing things like disabling array index checks, it seems some of the Ada benchmarks don't even use types equivalent to the C versions. OCaml does have good performance characteristics - decent overall code generation, fast exceptions, fast memory allocation and a simple, lightweight standard library - but most of the benchmarks in the shootout are simply bogus for many of the languages. They can be useful if you compare the performance of specific languages in specific benchmarks, as long as you look at the code as well to see what it is that's really being compared. A more interesting way to compare programming languages might be to see what programming techniques are possible (and efficient) in different languages and how well suited they are for different tasks. As you've noted, no one language is good at everything. One reason I like OCaml is that it makes a reasonable range of techniques efficient, and it doesn't have DSLish characteristics. ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners