Language progress? [partially OT]

Paulo Pinto pjmlp at progtools.org
Fri Oct 22 22:45:41 PDT 2010


I still have found memories of Pascal (actually Turbo Pascal/Delphi).

Not sure about FreePascal, but I remember Turbo Pascal used to have a better 
memory allocator
than C.

In the old days (Windows 3.x) the runtime memory manager has more optimized 
than the C compiler
family. Please note I am speaking about  Borland compilers here.

That not being the case, I would say that whoever implemented the algorithms 
in C is not as good as
the one who did them in Pascal. Or did not use the proper compiler flags.

--
Paulo


"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:i9tio7$26dd$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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 




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