[Haskell-cafe] Shootout favouring C

[Isaac Gouy]

> > Shootout favouring C
> > On 1/16/06, Daniel Fischer wrote:
> > Is it only my machime, or can you confirm that for
> > the Ackermann benchmark, it's very good for C that
they chose 
> > 9 and not a larger value? 

> Sebastian Sylvan <sebastian.sylvan at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is interesting. Hopefully it's not intentional,

Pardon my rudeness but this really is getting a bit
much!

Please keep to the true spirit of fictional crime
writing and provide a motive for these evil characters
who will stop at nothing to make Haskell seem some
worse than C.


> but it's quite obvious that for benchmarks where the
fastest
> time is only a few fractions of a second, languages
with more
> complex runtime systems will be unfairly slow due to
the
> startup cost.

Sebastian perhaps you'd like to provide something more
substantive than "quite obvious". 

Only last week I was sent some rude email based on the
claim that there was a strong correlation between how
well the Java programs  compared to the C programs,
and the time taken by the Java programs. 
I haven't heard from the author since I noted that he
had mistakenly made a correlation with the time taken
by the C programs, and there wasn't any correlation
between how well the Java programs compared and the
time taken by the Java programs.


> There is already a startup benchmark in there
Yes and if we make the huge assumption that it means
anything at all, then we are being unfair to Haskell
by 0.002s on every test - we only show measurements to
0.01s!


> In other words I'd prefer if all benchmarks are
> reconfigured to target an execution time of at least
a few
> seconds for the fastest benchmarks.

We run the Haskell regex-dna programs for 2500s -
isn't that long enough?

Let me join Simon Marlow in congratulating those who
are using the Shootout to advertise what Haskell can
do, by the straightforward approach of contributing
faster, smaller, more elegant programs.

best wishes, Isaac
 

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