Re: [Caml-list] Ray tracer language comparison

[Thomas Fischbacher <Thomas.Fischbacher@Physik.Uni-Muenchen.DE>]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Jon Harrop wrote:

> On Sunday 09 October 2005 06:26, you wrote:
> > http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf/raytracer/
> 
> I reformatted your code with tuareg indentation and 80-char columns to conform 
> with the other implementations for fair comparison,

The longest line in your original code has 79 columns. So does the longest 
line in my code. I do not use any indentation and formatting techniques 
which are not present in your original code as well.

> corrected the bug in a 
> call to printf and removed the superfluous parentheses.

Yes, I was notified of this as well and corrected it in the source. 
Concerning teh extra parens: I like them. Let's just consider this 
artisitc freedom, okay?

> Your code is then 1 
> line shorter and 8x slower than the previous implementation on my site.

What do you mean, "previous implementation"? You provide data for OCaml, 
and I suggested you should include Objective Caml into the comparison as 
well.

> I then rewrote it to be both shorter and faster.

Let us see:

> Printf.printf "P5\n%d %d\n255\n" n n;;
> for y = n - 1 downto 0 do
>   for x = 0 to n - 1 do
>     let g = ref 0. in
>     for dx = 0 to ss - 1 do

Ah. You eliminated the main function. Nice move. I suppose one could 
easily do this for the other implementations as well.



As some people out there seem to wonder what this is all about: 
I maintain the following claim.

- While Jon does not clearly state this on his web page, his main 
  criterion for a valid submission is that it must be impossible to 
  improve by making it both shorter and faster.

- The problem with this methodology is that it does not satisfy even 
  the most fundamental principle one would like to see in a proper comparison:

  If we take a product X, and a product Y, which in fact just again is 
  X, but let us pretend for now and threat them as if they were different,
  then it must not be possible to make a submission for X and a submission 
  for Y that both are valid under all the criteria applied, which lead to
  the conclusion that X is considerably better than Y.

Okay, Jon, you just managed to produce an Objective Caml implementation 
which shows that I am completely wrong, and indeed, Objective Caml is even 
much more succinct than OCaml, while being only about 50% slower than 
OCaml. Why don't you include that important result on your web page?

-- 
regards,               tf@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de              (o_
 Thomas Fischbacher -  http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf  //\
(lambda (n) ((lambda (p q r) (p p q r)) (lambda (g x y)           V_/_
(if (= x 0) y (g g (- x 1) (* x y)))) n 1))                  (Debian GNU)