I implemented the same variable argument function "varargs_adder" in both Perl 5 (addit.pl) and Parrot (f4.pasm). The variable arguments can be strings, integers or floats (I wanted to excercise dynamic variable behavior).
I called the function 500000 times in a loop to benchmark it. The results are not what I expected:
Perl 5.6.1: 2.79 seconds Parrot (non jit) 5.04 seconds Parrot (jit) 13.65 seconds
Interesting. However... the two programs aren't equivalent. You're using constant values and putting results onto an existing data structure in perl, so true 'equivalence' requires a few changes to the source. With those in place, I get the following:
Daoine:~/parrot dan$ time ./parrot ~/f4.pasm 21001097.970000
real 0m7.760s user 0m4.710s sys 0m0.110s Daoine:~/parrot dan$ time perl ~/f4.pl 21001097.97
real 0m15.924s user 0m10.460s sys 0m0.170s
Though I can't say I'm particularly thrilled with Parrot's speed here. (This is non-JITted, as I'm running it on my iBook and there's no working JIT for me at the moment for some reason) Even allocating the array new every time and using that new array gets:
Daoine:~/parrot dan$ time ./parrot ~/f4.pasm 21001097.970000
real 0m11.875s user 0m2.960s sys 0m0.720s
Still faster than perl but, again, I'm not happy at all with the results there.
Also, be aware that for these tests, there are two very important things to note:
1) Perl's data structures (the equivalent of PMCs) been heavily optimized, to date Parrot's haven't been
2) Parrot's Array and SArray values all accept mixed-type data, which perl's arrays do *not* do, and as such have some extra speed hits that perl arrays don't.
Having said that, you've hit on pretty fundamental problem with SArray and Array. I think I may tackle point #2 in a bit, as it ought to be reasonably straightforward to do, and see what falls out of it.
--
Dan
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Dan Sugalski even samurai
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