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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Very cool stuff. I started to play with Rust some more and started to really like it. Haven't gotten to macros yet.

I've been reading the official guides. Those helped clear up some difficult points for me: lifetimes and interfacing with lower level code.

http://doc.rust-lang.org/#guides

Also in what seems like a very short time, Rust community addressed the entries in Shootout Computer Benchmark game. Those are toy scores and one should not take them seriously. But unfortunately people do. So they made those fast.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/code-used-time-...

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"Those are toy scores and one should not take them seriously."

People keep saying that about The Shootout, but I don't think so. They reflect the combination of two qualities: the main implementation of the language, and the community around the language. It's way too cynical to say that the results cannot be taken seriously -- they just have to be taken carefully.

For instance, we can see that the Rust community was able to make their runs quite snappy quite easily, even though the implementation isn't even ready yet. That's impressive!

They are toy examples as far as proxies for actual performance in real life. Unless real life code is a lot of n-body computations and FASTa searching, and it is run on a Debian OS with 4 core 64 bit machine (or other 3 configurations) performance need to be measured on a representative workload.

But what I was getting at is that those scores are non-toy like and important for PR purposes. And as you said, they represent how active or caring the community is (and how sensitive it is to its _perceived_ performance).

So kudos to Rust community!

Maybe D should try to get into the game again. Unfortunately, D seems not sexy enough for the maintainer.

http://forum.dlang.org/post/hfuplv$1jjl$1@digitalmars.com

Maybe you should help the D community to publish some measurements!

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/lv7h1r$mg3$2@digitalmars.com?p...

That's not the real problem with the shootout scores.

The problem is that in quest for optimization the code for many languages becomes very much non idiomatic. Therefore the result does not accurately reflect real life performance, where writing idiomatic code outweighs the benefit of iterating on something to the nth degree in search of micro optimizations.

When performance matters, code is re-written to the nth degree. When it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

The results are exactly what they claim to be.

What you believe they reflect is not a claim made on the website.

When you cannot get the project name right, why should we pay any attention to what you say about the benchmarks game?

> why should we pay any attention to what you say about the benchmarks game?

I very much appologize and humble myself before the almighty benchmark gods. Please forgive me.

Basic reading skills -- Fail.

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