Language progress? [partially OT]

[bearophile]

Just a lazy note, don't take this too much seriously.

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game (Computer Shootout) has added some Clojure implementations, they are not tuned and refined yet (probably unlike the Free Pascal versions). This is one of the problems ("fasta"), there are two Free Pascal and two Clojure implementations:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php?test=fasta&sort=kb

The Clojure versions currently use about 370_000 KB of RAM to run, their source code is about 1_600 compressed bytes long, and their run time is about 30-38 seconds.

The Free Pascal versions use about 250 KB of RAM, their compressed source code is about 1_100-1_200 bytes long, and their runtime is 8-12 seconds.

I have written many small programs in Scheme, but for me that Free Pascal code is more readable than that Clojure code. Probably Free Pascal lacks some of the cool new features of Clojure (including a garbage collector), but I don't see much progress in languages development/hystory here ;-)


A question: Here for example the cheapest C program uses 452 KB of RAM. On average in the Shootout benchmarks Free Pascal uses less or quite less RAM than the D programs. Do you know why the Free Pascal programs use so little RAM?

Bye,
bearophile