[Haskell-cafe] Climbing up the shootout...

[Thomas Davie]

On 22 Sep 2008, at 11:46, Manlio Perillo wrote:

> Don Stewart ha scritto:
>> Thanks to those guys who've submitted parallel programs to the  
>> language
>> benchmarks game, we're climbing up the rankings, now in 3rd, and  
>> ahead
>> of C :)
>
> This is cheating, IMHO.
> Some test comparisons are unfair.
>
> The first problem is with the thread-ring benchmark.
> Haskell uses the "concurrent Haskell" extension, but all other  
> programs (with some exceptions) uses OS threads.
> This is unfair, as an example a C program can make use of the GNU  
> threads library, for user space threads), but there is no such  
> program.

Who said that C *had* to use OS threads?  The point of the shootout is  
to show the relative strengths of the various languages, one of the  
strengths of Haskell is some excellent lightweight thread support,  
this is not present in C, so C does badly on the tests that check how  
well you can deal with small threads.

> With parallel programs it is the same: other languages does not have  
> a parallel version.

Yes, and the new benchmarks are *specifically* designed to test how  
fast programs are on more recent multi-core hardware, so again, the  
other languages are welcome to submit parallel versions... It just  
turns out that Haskell is pretty damn good at doing parallelism.

Bob