On Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 18:23:19 UTC, Xinok wrote:
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?).
The problem is all those last bits:
- Line counts aren't a good measure of anything.
- What's safe and unsafe is very subjective.
- What's difficult is even more subjective.
There's also other variables:
- How idiomatic is the code?
- How well does it scale?
- How much headroom is there for more optimisation?
- How predictable is the performance?
- How well do you need to know the language's implementation to
do optimisations?
For example, optimised Haskell will often added strict evaluation
hints, and strict type hints, but these are very non-idiomatic,
and work against the lazy nature of the language.
D on the other hand does quite well with all these variables:
idiomatic D code is generally quite fast, and its abstractions
scale quite well. Performance is predictable and the language has
plenty of features allowing you to do unsafe things for more
performance if you so desire.
The problem with measuring all this stuff is that it's very
subjective, so I don't think there can be any standardised way of
assessing language performance.
