From: "Pedro Côrte-Real" <pedro@...>
Date: 2006-07-27T00:07:08+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C

On 7/26/06, Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin@gmail.com> wrote:
> Off the top of my head, I can think of some other design aspects that
> have an effect on performance: method lookup in OO languages, scoping,
> continuations, closures, static vs dynamic typing, type inference,
> double dispatch, consing + car + cdr in Lisp, direct vs indirect
> threading in Forth, etc. These are not just matters of implementation.
> Each is a language design decision with a semantic effect which incurs
> or avoids a computational cost, regardless of how it's actually
> implemented. For example, Ruby has real closures, Python doesn't. I
> don't see how you could ever reduce the cost of Ruby having closures
> to zero - the memory alone is an implied overhead. Sure you can
> optimize till the cows come home but different functionalities have
> different costs and you can't ever avoid that.

In theory if two programs in two different languages produce the same
exact results the perfect compilers for each of the languages would
end up producing the same code. In theory practice is the same as
theory but in practice it isn't.

Cheers,

Pedro.