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Comment by isofruit | Hacker News Reader

How can such a benchmark be in any way informative? How much am I allowed to optimize the nim code? How much am I allowed to optimize the Rust code? Am I allowed to just change nim's GC to ARC/ORC? I'm sorry but this just does not make any sense to me.

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It is more informative than nothing. It shows different languages implementing the same functions and the performance of those. It is something to compare to. Maybe they can all be optimized, etc. But you need to have some kind of starting point. I think people tend to poo-poo benchmarks (unless their fav language at top) and claim they don't represent real world. But I always argue that they at the very minimum give you some context for comparison. If you look at how they are implemented you can get further context. I only wish the benchmarks had some metric for how idiomatic the implementation is compared to normal developers.

Yes.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

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> I only wish the benchmarks had some metric for how idiomatic the implementation is compared to normal developers.

Maybe the benchmarks game website kind-of does — source code size.

Otherwise "I only wish…" so — wishful thinking.

Otherwise "how idiomatic" seems to mean — how I would implement the program today, if I didn't care [goldilocks] too much about performance?

(Incidentally "normal developers" doesn't seem to be stretching towards inclusive.)

All benchmarks are informative, also all benchmarks are imperfect and incomplete, for reasons you have specified and many others.

However it is a mistake to then suppose that nothing can be known and just go ahead and use Python to make a AAA first person shooter.

On the flipside slow languages (Python included) are used to script some AAA games.

And no language other than C++ has really found traction for stuff like engines; not even Rust...

What AAA games use Python?

I think Eve Online uses python.

They do, and its caused them a lot of headache, probably was a mistake. If they would have at least used something like C#/Java/Go (go didn't exist at the time) they might not have had to do time-slowdowns to make large battles possible.

Then again maybe it would have slowed down development and never gotten off the ground at all!

IIRC, Eve used Stackless Python, not normal CPython.

Civ6 btw

I thought only Civ IV used python.

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