Re: [Haskell-cafe] Shootout favouring C

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Shootout favouring C On 1/16/06, Daniel Fischer wrote: Is it only my machime, or can you confirm that for the Ackermann benchmark, it's very good for C that they chose 9 and not a larger value?

Sebastian Sylvan wrote: This is interesting. Hopefully it's not intentional,

but it's quite obvious that for benchmarks where the fastest time is only a few fractions of a second, languages with more complex runtime systems will be unfairly slow due to

Pardon my rudeness but this really is getting a bit much! Please keep to the true spirit of fictional crime writing and provide a motive for these evil characters who will stop at nothing to make Haskell seem some worse than C. the

startup cost.

Sebastian perhaps you'd like to provide something more substantive than "quite obvious". Only last week I was sent some rude email based on the claim that there was a strong correlation between how well the Java programs compared to the C programs, and the time taken by the Java programs. I haven't heard from the author since I noted that he had mistakenly made a correlation with the time taken by the C programs, and there wasn't any correlation between how well the Java programs compared and the time taken by the Java programs.

There is already a startup benchmark in there Yes and if we make the huge assumption that it means anything at all, then we are being unfair to Haskell by 0.002s on every test - we only show measurements to 0.01s!

In other words I'd prefer if all benchmarks are reconfigured to target an execution time of at least a few seconds for the fastest benchmarks.

We run the Haskell regex-dna programs for 2500s - isn't that long enough? Let me join Simon Marlow in congratulating those who are using the Shootout to advertise what Haskell can do, by the straightforward approach of contributing faster, smaller, more elegant programs. best wishes, Isaac __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com