I'm still trying to figure out what the point of the shootout really is. If
there's no dedicated folks working with a language there, trying to make
things run faster, a language will come out looking inefficient potentially.
There's a lot of compile flags and optimizations that can make a difference
in probably all of the languages listed on that page.
I guess all you can get from the shootout is a sense of what a particular
language or set of tools is capable of in the hands of the programmers who
submit implementations. It doesn't really give you a concrete idea as to
how to evaluate a programming language.
It does still seem kind of fun for some reason though :-)
Dave
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 5:47 PM, Louis Wasserman
Hey,
I was looking at the reverse-complement benchmark on the Language Shootout, and among other things, I noticed that the Haskell implementation was using (filter (/= '\n')) on ByteStrings, and also using lists as queues.
I had a few improvements which using -fasm seem to yield about a 19% improvement in speed, and a 35% reduction in allocation, on my computer. (If both programs are compiled with -fllvm -- I'm not sure whether or not that's fair game on the Shootout -- my implementation is 35% faster, and does 10% less allocation.) I've checked my code on the Shootout's test input, as well.
Mostly, the improvement comes from a tightly specialized version of (filter (/= '\n')), although eliminating an intermediate list entirely (and one used in a queuelike fashion) didn't seem to hurt. I managed to cut the program to a point where the program size is about the same as before.
The code is at http://hpaste.org/fastcgi/hpaste.fcgi/view?id=25865; the previous implementation is at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=revcomp&lang=ghc&id=2 .
Let the arguing begin?
Louis Wasserman wasserman.louis@gmail.com http://profiles.google.com/wasserman.louis
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