Parallel Rogue-like benchmark

[bearophile]

H. S. Teoh:

> Seriously, I don't understand what's with this obsession with 
> line count metrics.
> ...
> Frankly, the fact that line counts are used at all has already
> decremented the author's credibility for me.

I agree with you. When you show a table to people, and such table 
is ranked according to run-time and cloc counts, some readers 
will judge better languages the ones that have lower run-time and 
lower line count.

In my D code I like to add unittests, contracts, asserts for loop 
invariants, and so on. All such things increase the line count. A 
person could say that in theory a better language should offer 
safety even without all those extra tests, so those extra lines 
of code should be counted for the length of the D entry, and 
removing them is not fair to improve the D line count metric.

But in most languages (including D, C, Python, etc) you can write 
code that has various degrees of safety. This means that a D 
entry without those compile-time and run-time tests is just as 
valid as D code with those tests.

This means using just the line count metric is not enough, you 
somehow have to produce entries that show similar level of safety 
(and doing this across different languages is not easy), only now 
the metric count is meaningful.

In the meantime in Rosettacode and other places where D code is 
shown and compared to code written in other languages I put all 
the run-time and compile-time tests I feel necessary, because for 
a professional programmer that's the right thing to do, from an 
engineering point of view.

Said that, in such comparisons wasting space is not a good idea.

Bye,
bearophile