benchmark

[Chris Mellon]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 8:12 AM, alex23 <wuwei23 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 7, 8:08 pm, M8R-n7v... at mailinator.com wrote:
>> Really how silly can it be when you suggest someone is taking a
>> position and tweaking the benchmarks to prove a point [...]
>
> I certainly didn't intend to suggest that you had tweaked -anything-
> to prove your point.
>
> I do, however, think there is little value in slavishly implementing
> the same algorithm in different languages. To constrain a dynamic
> language by what can be achieved in a static language seemed like such
> an -amazingly- artificial constraint to me. That you're a fan of
> Python makes such a decision even more confusing.
>
> It's great that you saw value in Python enough to choose it for actual
> project work. It's a shame you didn't endeavour to understand it well
> enough before including it in your benchmark.
>
> As for it being "disappointing", the real question is: has it been
> disappointing for you in actual real-world code?
>
> Honestly, performance benchmarks seem to be the dick size comparison
> of programming languages.
> -

I actually think that modelling this problem the way he chose to, with
a Person class and by manually popping stuff out of a linked list
instead of more simply representing the alive/dead state of the
soldiers is a poor solution in general. Whenever you talk about
performance, you need to have a context to evaluate it in and you need
an idea of what you're trying to measure and why it's important for
your purposes. A solution which models the soldiers as bits in a
bitfield is going to run much, much, much faster in C/C++/D than the
current OO/linked list one (not to mention in much less space), and
the JIT in Java/C# and probably python with psyco can improve that as
well.