Re: [Caml-list] Is OCaml fast?

[Jeff Schultz <jws@csse.unimelb.edu.au>]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 06:23:38PM +0100, Oliver Bandel wrote:
> ...looks like they are biased...

> .... not that we are not ;)

> To reject environment variables, I can see as acceptable in this case,
> but rejecting the GC-stuff does not make sense, because, as just mentioned, 
> it is avalable by the programmer from within the code.

I haven't looked at the "benchmark game" or its predecessor for many
years, but all this really says is that the programs it measures are
sufficiently unlike real applications that the OCaml developers
haven't been tempted to tune the GC defaults for them.

The conclusion to draw would be that the shootout results are a
poor, and probably misleading, evidence base for selecting a
programming language for execution time performance.  Measured
programming language implementation performance gets faster or
slower over the years due to its own rule changes and language and
library implementation changes, but I doubt that this conclusion
changes much ;-)


The one thing the shootout programs are useful for is to get a feel
for a variety of different languages' expressivity for a common set
of "small" problems.


    Jeff Schultz