From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2006-08-08T17:43:37+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C - Part 3, Source code now available

Isaac Gouy wrote:
> Peter Hickman wrote:
>   
>> Actually this is a miss reading.
>>     
>
> What is a misreading?
>   

That all the implementations had to use the same Perl pre compute phase. 
That was just the way I did mine and I think that people have taken it 
as read that this is a requirement. Despite the Ruby Ocaml and C++ 
versions not doing this.

>> The whole point of the first post was
>> to point out that the speed up from going from Perl (or any scripting
>> language) to C. I used the same Perl code to pre compute values to
>> create the C header file because I already had code at this point that
>> did the work and the impact of doing the pre compute was pretty much
>> insignificant to the overall run time. I then used to same technique to
>> get the Java implementation. I have never claimed that the C version was
>> the best possible implementations only that it delivered a massive
>> performance boost. I think that I have proven that.
>>     
>
> Now I'm puzzled - isn't that just conventional wisdom? Isn't it
> conventional wisdom that a program transformed by an optimizing
> compiler will be faster than a program interpreted at runtime?
>   

It's the degree of speed up that I felt that people are overlooking, 
lets take the following:

Ruby 10.060 (user + sys)
C 3.350
Ocaml 2.558

C doesn't just shave a few percentage points off, you get a massive 
boost without having to do anything weird. C seems to be /too hard/ for 
many people, especially people who have never used it.

However Ocaml is an eye opener.

>> The only requirement is that I can get an implementation of the language
>> in question on my Macintosh.
>>     
>
> D and Clean are other languages you might look at, but using a
> different language won't make what you're trying to do any more
> feasible.
>   
True, but as I've said before C is a fragile language to work in if 
you've come from a scripting background. A program will compile and then 
crash with not the slightest hint at what went wrong, so any language 
that will allow me to get that sort of performance with a better support 
is a good thing. I will be learning Ocaml for this reason alone.