From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2006-09-14T23:00:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Metaruby, BFTS, Cardinal and Rubicon - State of play?

------=_Part_66785_7471600.1158242411517
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline

On 9/14/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
>
> Austin Ziegler wrote:
> >> I'm even happier that it's drawing some attention to the various
> >> Ruby implementations and the growing toolkit around them.
> >
> > I'd be happier if Mr Tew didn't try to lend legitimacy to the alioth
> > shootout. Microbenchmarks don't show anything useful, even if they're
> > run correctly -- which the shootout has never been run correctly. It
> > isn't even administered correctly. (I was similarly annoyed that Joel
> > Spolsky used it in his latest slam on Ruby. Stupid, Joel, stupid.)
> >
> > -austin
> Well ... as a working performance engineer, I'm going to defend
> microbenchmarks as virtually (no pun intended) the *only* way to improve
> performance over all for the Ruby interpreter, coupled of course with
> profiling said interpreter and careful design of the data structures the
> interpreter must maintain during execution.
>
> The simple fact is that programmers are going to write nested loops,
> either explicitly a la Fortran or implicitly, for example, in
>
> a =3D mat1*mat2
>
> where mat1 and mat2 are matrices defined with "Matrix." Programmers are
> going to read large files and apply regular expression transformations
> to every line in those files. Programmers are going to define data
> structures for real-world problems just like they do for the Tower of
> Hanoi benchmark. To quote Yul Brynner, "Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
>
> .
>
And you benchmark algorithms written in the same language, BUT the shootout
benchmarks *different languages* and I have looked at the algorithms they
use just once, that was enough.

The point is use it as a tool if you find it useful, but here it is used fo=
r
advocacy.

Cheers
Robert




--=20
Deux choses sont infinies : l'univers et la b=EAtise humaine ; en ce qui
concerne l'univers, je n'en ai pas acquis la certitude absolue.

- Albert Einstein

------=_Part_66785_7471600.1158242411517--