On Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 18:23:19 UTC, Xinok wrote:
Once in a while, a thread pops up in the newsgroups pitting D
against some other language. More often than not, these
comparisons are flawed, non-encompassing, and uninformative.
Most recently with the article comparing D with Go and Rust,
the community pointed out a few flaws involving a late addition
of one of the D compilers, build configurations
(-noboundscheck?), and the random number generator used.
Then when I think about how web browsers are compared, there
are conventional measures and standard benchmarking tools (e.g.
sunspider). They measure performance for javascript, rendering,
HTML5, etc. They also measure startup times (hot/cold boot),
memory usage, etc. Finally, there are feature comparisons, such
as what HTML5 features each browser supports.
These are the type of comparisons I'd like to see with
programming languages. For starters, there should be standard
"challenges" (algorithms and such) implemented in each language
designed to measure various aspects of the language, such as
sorting, number crunching, and string processing. However,
rather than leave it to a single individual to implement the
algorithm in several different languages, it should be left to
the community to collaborate and produce an "ideal"
implementation of the algorithm in their language. We could
analyze factors other than performance, such as the ease of
implementation (how many lines? does it use safe/unsafe
features? Was it optimized using unsafe / difficult features?).
Sounds very much like this:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
You can compare code size, memory need, execution time for
various programs and lots of languages. Safety is not considered
though, but how would you measure that?
It is called a "game", because you can adapt the weights until
your favorite language is the winner. ;)
D entries were provided, but removed at some point, because it
looked like the C code.
