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0 pointsslavak15y ago0 comments

That's true, but these posts aren't ever of the "language Y is actually as good as or better than C, always!" variety, are they? Instead what we get is the results of (in the best case) a couple of micro-benchmarks that happen to show comparable performance to C.

If someone could show me that "yes, your Python programs are now AS FAST AS C!" then of course I'd be ecstatic to hear that; but the posts letting me know that "Python is as fast as C when approximating solutions to problem X, for some X you've never heard of and never will" get kind of old after the 137th time I read them.

For me this is comparable to someone posting about yet another problem in NP that is REALLY FRICKIN' HARD, so probably P=/=NP. I know many problems in NP are hard - you're not adding anything to the discussion by showing me yet another one. Let me know when you have an actual proof that P=/=NP.

0 pointsslavak15y ago0 comments

0 comments

5 comments · 3 top-level

GregBuchholz15y ago· 2 in thread

It is interesting to note that a beautiful python program from the "interesting alternative" category [1] beats the C program, and LuaJIT is always impressive [2] on these sorts of microbenchmarks (beating SBCL, with one third the source code).

[1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=spect...

[2] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=spect...

igouy15y ago

[1] 12.54s < 11.14s ?

GregBuchholz15y ago

My bad. I must have been confusing the SBCL time for the GCC time.

sedachv15y ago

If you are such an expert on what makes a benchmark representative of "real-world" problems, you're welcome to make a contribution to the Shootout. I'm sure they'll be glad to accept it, and everyone will be relieved to find out all the other benchmarks are worthless and everyone has been wasting their time.

gte910h15y ago

Actually slavak, inner loop C performance is all that's necessarily to make many of these tools viable.

If I can write my entire program in LANGUAGEX and just compile the inner loop a magic way and voila, the program runs at 85% C speed, we have a winner. We can use it in long-running programs which have a fierce compute time bounding.

This is an article explaining the magic way for a flavor of lisp.

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