From: Premshree Pillai <premshree.pillai@...>
Date: 2005-01-24T18:27:59+09:00
Subject: Re: looking at ruby...

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:16:47 +0900, Paris Sinclair <paris@perlpuma.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Premshree Pillai wrote:
> 
> >>> You can find some standard benchmarks at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
> >>
> >> the requirements are that each language implement the sollution exactly the
> >> same as some other language implementation that was already done.
> >
> > Umm, what makes you think the implementations are done differently for
> > different languages? They use a standard algorithm -- for obvious
> > reasons -- across all the languages.
> 
> Yes, normally when you are benchmarking and comparing language, you start with
> a problem and what the end result of the solution should be. And then of course
> the exact implementation in each language will be appropriate to that language.
> For example, sorting in C often looks very different from sorting in Perl. THe
> lowest common denominator will be C-ish. And Ruby's ranges are another example.
> In these benchmarks, the format forces the Ruby code to look like C.
>         for i in 0 .. (rows - 1)
> instead of
>         (0...rows).each { |i| ... }

Ah, there you have a point. That's a serious flaw then.  Methinks the
program should just follow the high-level algorithms, and then be
implemented in the particular language using whatever data
structure/controls are optimized for that language.

> I don't know in this case if there is a difference in performance. I a nuby.
> BUt I know that in Perl, the Perl-ish constructs are the ones best optimized.
> If you structure your code the same as a Java app, it will go sloooow. Even at
> tasks like sorting, where the opposite is usually true in real life. You
> wouldn't hand-code a quicksort, because the included one is lightning speed.
> 
> --
> RubyPanther
> 
> 


-- 
Premshree Pillai
http://www.livejournal.com/~premshree