Re: [dev] [OT]: Go programming language

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 02:54:23PM +0100, Tobias Ulmer wrote:
>On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 02:24:41PM +0100, frederic wrote:
>> All this is more than just nit-picking. Pike claims a 10-20% loss
>> compared to C, which would still be quite good. However, the first
>> benchmarks tell another story at the moment:
>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=go
>
>Be careful with this link, the results may be ok for higher level
>languages with built-in datatypes, but they are not for low level
>languages. One example i've looked at just yesterday demonstrates
>this nicely:
>
>http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=knucleotide&lang=all&box=1
>
>The C version has a very generic (and for this problem set ineffective)
>hash table implementation, while the C++ examples use every trick in
>the book to make hashed lists for each of the different iterations to
>get much better performance.
>
>Take a look at the implementation before you draw any conclusion,
>that's all.

I'd also mention that that compares 6g, rather than GCC Go, to
GCC C. 6g uses very meager optimizations, and they claim that
the GCC version is faster. The standard caveat of the shootout
stands: it compares implementations, not languages. If you want
a truly fair comparison, look at the two GCC-based versions, and
even then consider the fact that the Go compiler is still in
alpha while the C implementation is mature (though obviously
a crufty heap of rubbish, nonetheless).

-- 
Kris Maglione
The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the
complexities of his own making.
	--Edsger W. Dijkstra