[ruby-talk:8663] Re: Interesting Language performance comparisons - Ruby, OCAML etc

In article <932reg$44t$[e-mail]>,
Jean Michel <[e-mail]> wrote:
>In article <[e-mail]>,
>g forever <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>Interesting comparisons between languages for performance.
>>see http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/craps.shtml
>>Ruby does pretty well.
>>
>>List processing and a few other areas seem somewhat significantly slower.
>>Beats Python and perl in almost all cases.
>
>The  individual memory/cpu  numbers are  quite interesting.  Contrary to
>what you  say, they show ruby  behing perl/python most of  the time (the
>reason ruby fares quite well is that *all* tests were easily implemented
>in  ruby while  other languages  were maybe  not quite  so fun  thus are
>missing points on  unimplemented tests). 

Actually, in the overall scoreboard on that page, Ruby is shown to be
ahead of Python (Ruby at 422, Python at 412 - higherscores are better)
and slower than Perl (to be expected at this point, really - but we're
not THAT far off, Perl is at 476).

I really don't understand why Java scores higher than gcc - they must've
sped up Java a lot since I played with it last (it has been a few years).

And then there's the Winner (of these tests anyway) Ocaml - I'm not sure
what that is, but it beat out the next closest one (Java) by 114 points!

>Most interesting for  me is the
>ackerman and heapsort which purely test the speed of the interpreter and
>where ruby  is about twice as  slow as most other  interpreted languages

Note that ruby comes in just behind perl in this test (well it is about 10
seconds behind).  This seems to be a test of recursion.

>  The reason  why we all  prefer ruby is  also apparent: almost  all the
>time the ruby solution is the shortest  and most elegant. If it could be
>as fast, we would beat hell out of other languages!

Seems that Ruby is already doing pretty well in this particular suite of
tests.  And there probably is room for some improvement in some of these
tests.

Phil