I'm still playing with some benchmarks, mostly from the shootout.
I made a tentative implementation of a file_read_line function in
neko's std lib, which allowed me to write a File iterator for haXe.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?
test=sumcol&lang=gcc
file_read_line in C is implemented a lot more trivialy.
It's not "correct" since it limits the line size to 128 but it
seems acceptable for the shootout.
ok, it's just that it's a limiting factor to not have it in neko
Other thing, it that you're not benchmarking Neko there, but haXe.
There's additional things done in haXe :
- wrapping the Neko string into the object String
- iterators
I know, I'm not trying to make an 'honest' benchmark but to get a
general feeling of the performance I would get. That's why I'm not
trying to optimize everything to the max
var s = 0;
try {
while( true )
s += Std.parseInt(f.readLine());
} catch( e : Dynamic ) {
neko.Lib.print(s);
}
It's a little convoluted...
As far as benchmarking is concerned, neko feels on par with
Python, which is to say not very fast compared to VM based
language like Java or even Lua. Lua is certainly the fastest
interpreted language there is.
It depends a lot what you're benchmarking and how. The main
difference between Lua and Neko VM are :
a) Neko has different data structures (object, array, string,
integer) with different representations, this should perform better
and allow more strictly typed program
b) I think Lua VM is using threaded code optimizations (only
available on GCC) which can speedup opcode dispatching by 50%. It
has not been added on Neko yet.
On which platform are your running your benchmarks ? Which which
compiler did you compiled Neko ?
I'm testing on OS X, everything is compiled with GCC 4. I'm comparing
with Lua because you've been pretty dismissive of its performance on
many occasions. I also ran some of your neko programs in the bench
directory and most of the time neko is 3 times slower than Lua
(except for binary-trees where neko is almost as fast as java).
I'm still playing with these not so serious benchmarks to get a
feel of the platform's strengths and weaknesses, right now I'm a
little surprised not to see any gains over Python...
If you post your code and results, I'll have a look and try to
explain why. Neko might indeed need some optimizations, but they
will come with JIT this summer. Keep your benchmarks so you can run
them again at this time ;)
The problem with posting results is that it can be a little
misleading due to the varying conditions in which the test are run.
I'm not that interested about performance but you've talked a lot
about the performance of Neko, so I wanted to have a feel of it. Have
you compared your Neko bench programs with Lua?
Cheers
Alex
--
Neko : One VM to run them all
(http://nekovm.org)
