The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: toby@telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain)
Subject: [TUHS] lisp challenge
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 18:18:28 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1982c016-3eb6-cadd-75e7-80d2a081ac07@telegraphics.com.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8a4ac448-9ed2-016a-6440-33597e36915d@kilonet.net>

On 2018-02-16 5:56 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> Has ANY language (except assembler) EVER outperformed C in a big way?
> 
> Give or take any optimizations that may be done by either?
> 


As Tim wisely pointed out, performance isn't a property of a language,
but a program, so the idea that C is some kind of untouchable ultimate
in speed makes no sense. There are aspects of its design that militate
_against_ performance and preclude optimisations that are possible in
other languages.

Therefore nobody should be shocked that programs in other languages
certainly _have_ beaten C for the same tasks. An illuminating example is
the Haskell Mio system which has benchmarked to outperform C web
servers. Expect more progress from that direction.

--Toby


  parent reply	other threads:[~2018-02-16 23:18 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2018-02-16 21:01 Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 21:03 ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 22:05 ` Bakul Shah
2018-02-16 22:28   ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 22:53     ` Donald ODona
2018-02-16 23:01       ` Arthur Krewat
2018-02-16 22:56     ` Arthur Krewat
2018-02-16 23:02       ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 23:18       ` Toby Thain [this message]
2018-02-16 23:41         ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 23:49     ` Bakul Shah
2018-02-16 23:34 ` Andy Kosela
2018-02-16 23:44 Noel Chiappa

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=1982c016-3eb6-cadd-75e7-80d2a081ac07@telegraphics.com.au \
    --to=toby@telegraphics.com.au \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).