You should have read the entire article:
> How fast is Clojure at running your code once it finally has got going? ... Clojure is on average 4x slower than Java and 2x slower than Scala.
That's pretty freaking slow.
> How fast is Clojure at running your code once it finally has got going? ... Clojure is on average 4x slower than Java and 2x slower than Scala.
That's pretty freaking slow.
It's all relative.
[1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...
That said, they are fun to look at. I just had a wtf-moment looking at this:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=n...
~20 seconds vs ~20 minutes??
Any benchmark is only useful if...
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclusions.p...
2) "unfairly" targeted at low-level languages
Don't make "unfair" accusations -- say why you think that.
3) ~20 seconds vs ~20 minutes??
Did you mean vs ~20 hours?
Because there seems to be a bias in selecting the problems solved in the benchmark games: to be "fair" they should be randomly selected from a pool of all possible problems solved with computer programs. Or, maybe, the frequency of these problems in the real world should be taken into account?
Of course, they're not actually unfair since they hide nothing. The error is in the interpretation, e.g. "My program will be faster if I write it in language X instead of Y."
The nice link you posted sums it up well: "Programming languages are compared against each other as though their designers intended them to be used for the exact same purpose - that just isn't so."
edit: Spelling..
So don't say that they are!
2) "The nice link you posted sums it up well"
I agree - but then I wrote those words.
3) "there seems to be a bias in selecting the problems solved in the benchmark games"
You still haven't said anything that suggests they are "targeted at low-level languages".
3) GP? Your opining about "selecting the problems" doesn't support the claim "targeted at low-level languages" anymore than it supports the claim targeted at high-level languages :-)
As you noted the important thing to remember is that timing measurements are not promises, and they aren't general answers to the question - Will my program be faster if I write it in language X?
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=fa...
Note that the "alternative" Lisp SBCL and Java 7 programs both outperform Fortran.
Of course I agree with you on wtf-moments. WTF makes Ruby take an hour, and SBCL take 10 seconds? That's two orders of magnitude! But no matter, I imagine a more clever Ruby programmer could reduce that, or just call out to a native library.
A program that simply switched according the command line arg and then printed:
3968050
Pfannkuchen(12) = 65
>>I imagine a more clever Ruby programmer could reduce that...<<
Is "a more clever Ruby programmer" some kind of equivalent to "a sufficiently smart compiler"? :-)
>>or just call out to a native library<<
When is a Ruby program fast? When it's written in C ;-)
Of course making programs do less can improve speed, and a great way of doing that is compile-time computation via macros! You can finish the program before it's even run.
> Is "a more clever Ruby programmer" some kind of equivalent to "a sufficiently smart compiler"?
No, since we assume human intelligence here. :P As the Graphics Programming Black Book puts it in the Chapter 1 title, "The Best Optimizer is between Your Ears".
> When is a Ruby program fast? When it's written in C ;-)
I'm going to use this one.
Maybe "a more clever Ruby programmer" always drops-down to C?
Maybe there's only a more clever Rails programmer :-)
I did an experiment once, testing out a simple web-service on the JVM and Scala (with Scalatra) yields the same performance as Java (with Jax-RS), while Clojure (with Noir) is only 2x to 3x as slow and JRuby (Sinatra) is only 4x-5x as slow as Java.
You seem to be complaining that the programmers were not forced to write slow programs :-)
>>I did an experiment once...<<
And you used libraries.
I suppose in a vacuum it is indeed (assuming the measurements are general), but in my actual use the speed of Clojure has been more than sufficient. People like to view programming language speed as a black and white issue in the context of blog and HN posting, but in many uses runtime and startup speed considerations are only part of the puzzle.