computer language shootout

[brk@jenkon.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Miles Egan [SMTP:miles@caddr.com]
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 10:11:20AM -0700, brk@jenkon.com wrote:
> > I have to say (and this also relates to the newbie question thread) that
> I
> > don't understand why GHC fares so poorly, and I guess I find it a little
> > frustrating.
> 
> I think it's important to keep these benchmarks in perspective, though.
> As Doug
> Bagley himself says, these kinds of benchmarks are pretty hard to
> interpret and
> are subject to a lot of noise.  Extrapolating performance on small
> artificial
> problems like this to real application performance is not at all
> straightforward.  That said, this is a small p.r. problem.
> 
	[Bryn Keller]  
	While this is absolutely true, and well worth remembering, GHC's
performance is in some cases reasonably competitive, but in others is many
times slower than Ocaml. For instance:

	Times are C/Ocaml/GHC

	Sum a Column of Integers:	0.73 / 0.99 / 9.98
	Array Access:				0.11/ 0.14 / 18.78

	But there are also entries like:

	Ackermann's Function		0.09 / 0.04 / 0.06

	Where Ocaml and GHC were both *faster* than C, and GHC was quite
close to Ocaml.

	I'm just wondering why we can't get performance like (at least)
Ocaml on all the tests, not just some.


	Bryn