From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.83]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id E16F4BBAF for ; Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:39:47 +0100 (CET) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AicFAJLq7ExQW+UMgWdsb2JhbACBVpMojgYVAQEWIiKuS4dBiQmFRwSKYA X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.59,249,1288566000"; d="scan'208";a="80893078" Received: from lo.gmane.org ([80.91.229.12]) by mail2-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 24 Nov 2010 19:39:47 +0100 Received: from list by lo.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1PLKFo-00047C-2o for caml-list@inria.fr; Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:39:40 +0100 Received: from c-24-4-7-10.hsd1.ca.comcast.net ([24.4.7.10]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:39:40 +0100 Received: from igouy2 by c-24-4-7-10.hsd1.ca.comcast.net with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:39:40 +0100 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: caml-list@inria.fr From: Isaac Gouy Subject: Re: Is OCaml fast? Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:39:20 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: sea.gmane.org User-Agent: Loom/3.14 (http://gmane.org/) X-Loom-IP: 24.4.7.10 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.12) X-Spam: no; 0.00; ocaml:01 language's:01 erroneously:01 normalized:01 language's:01 graph:01 graph:01 writes:01 measurements:01 shootout:02 shootout:02 seems:03 interpret:03 misleading:03 languages:03 David Allsopp metastack.com> writes: -snip- > Reducing an entire programming language's strengths (or > weaknesses!) to a single number is just not really realistic - the truth is more complex than one > single-precision floating point number (or even an array of them) can describe. (NB. The shootout > doesn't claim that the final ranking displayed is anything other than a score of how well the languages did > at the various benchmarks given - but a graph like that is easy to interpret erroneously in that way) -snip- That summary page > > (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are- > > fastest.php) shows box plots (quartiles, outliers, median) of the normalized timing measurements for each of the tasks, for each of the language implementations. A graph like that shows some of those language implementations are very fast for some benchmark programs and very slow for others. To characterize that as "reducing an entire programming language's strengths (or weaknesses!) to a single number" seems kind-of misleading. Especially when the question that page answers is stated 3 times - "Which programming language implementations have the fastest benchmark programs?"