benchmark

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

alex23:
> Honestly, performance benchmarks seem to be the dick size comparison
> of programming languages.

I don't agree:
- benchmarks can show you what language use for your purpose (because
there are many languages, and a scientist has to choose the right tool
for the job);
- it can show where a language implementation needs improvements (for
example the Haskell community has improved one of their compilers
several times thank to the Shootout, the D community has not yet done
the same because the language is in a too much fast evolving phase
still, so performance tunings is premature still);
- making some code faster for a benchmark can teach you how to make
the code faster in general, how CPUs work, or even a some bits of
computer science;
- if the benchmarks are well chosen and well used, they can show you
what are the faster languages (you may say 'the faster
implementations', and that's partially true, but some languages have a
semantic that allows better or much better optimizations). A computer
is a machine useful for many purposes, programming languages allow
some users to make the machine act as they want. So computers and
languages give some power, they allow you to do something that you
can't do without a computer. A language can give you power because it
gives you the ability to write less bug-prone code, or it can give you
more pre-built modules that allow you to do more things in less time,
or it can give you the power to perform computations in less time, to
find a specific solution faster. So Python and C give you different
kinds of power, and they are both useful. Other languages like D/Java
try to become a compromise, they try to give you as much as possible
of both "powers" (and they sometimes succeed, a D/Ocaml program may be
almost as fast as C, while being on the whole much simpler/safer to
write than C code).

Bye,
bearophile