I doubt the shootout is without merit. In the very least, it shows the general speed of a language implementation. That is why the languages that we already know are slowest are at the bottom of the list and the fastest at the top. Sometimes, "faster than Ruby" or "slightly slower than Java" is the information one needs to make an informed decision.
Besides, one of the great strengths of the shootout is that it is active. Search for benchmarks on database systems, for example, and you cannot get to the end of one-off tests comparing MySQL latest to PostgreSQL 7 (older version). The shootout is a fair fight and does establish an accurate general speed mark for the languages. Does anyone look at the list and think, "there's no way OCaml is that fast"? No, I think people look at the list and think, "looks about right". I would agree that the actual scores are meaningless (aside from memory usage). The overall ranking, however, is telling. Regards, McKinley --- skaller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I doubt this. Lua has hardly any operations, so it > isn't > surprising it does those fast. The Shootout isn't a > meaningful > guide to anything. Testing some of the same things I > get > wildly different results (and my results are the > result of > re-running the tests in random order over many > hours). > > -- > John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> > Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net > > > -- > Neko : One VM to run them all > (http://nekovm.org) > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- Neko : One VM to run them all (http://nekovm.org)
