Re: [Haskell-cafe] Language Shootout reverse-complement benchmark

On a similar note, there was no parallelized implementation for spectral-norm, even though Haskell had been doing rather well on the single-core benchmark. Heh. Louis Wasserman wasserman.louis@gmail.com http://profiles.google.com/wasserman.louis On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote:

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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

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 10:25 AM, David Leimbach wrote: potentially.

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There's a lot of compile flags and optimizations that can make a difference in probably all of the languages listed on that page.

'Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.'

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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

The Shootout has a number of valuable purposes:

1) Concrete evidence that language X *can*, somehow, be as fast as language Y 2) Public examples of techniques to do #1, again concrete 3) Exposes where libraries/compilers can do better (this has happened many times with GHC and Haskell libraries) 4) Motivates people to work on creating/fixing #2 and #3

-- gwern