[Discuss] Language Benchmarks (was Functional programming @ UVic (which was 'C' string tokenizer for those who hate strtok))

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-07-01 08:52-0700 Adam Parkin wrote:

> Just to add a little more fuel to the fire: found a website with some 
> benchmarks comparing different languages.  Not really much in the way of 
> surprises, and of course many of them might be considered completely 
> misleading in that they're not real-world programs, but still interesting to 
> check out:
>
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/

Interesting site.  As expected on numerical problems (the two I looked
at were n-body simulation, and spectral norm) python and perl were about
a factor of 100 slower than the lead group.  It's too bad they didn't
try python/Numeric or Perl/PDL on the same problems.

The fortran 95 run times and results (e.g., an error result for one of the
two cases I looked at) were quite variable for the same problem.  I am
having trouble figuring out which fortran compiler (ifort, gfortran, or g95)
was used for each of these cases, but I assume it was either gfortran or g95
that generated the error.  That's fairly typical; both of them are rapidly
improving products so the success rate depends very much on which version
you choose to use and which fortran 95 language extension features are used
in your programme.  My experience is gfortran works fine on old-style
fortran 77 code, and I am told many fortran 95 extensions work fine although I
don't have any experience with that, yet, because I am just learning those
extensions.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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