D component programming is a joke (Was: Re: Component programming)

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 7/31/13 4:17 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>
>> Ironically, the component program from the article I wrote:
>> ...
>> is 2x faster than the Haskell version:
>
> Benchmarking code written in two different languages is tricky, there
> are so many sources of mistakes, even if you know well both languages.

I measured the timings. It was in a discussion between Walter, myself, 
and a common friend. That friend said Haskell will do a lot better on 
the same task. I measured by piping 1,000,000 lines of real log data 
through the tested programs.

His first version was:

import Data.List main = interact $ unlines . sort . lines

This took 51 seconds. The friend got a bit miffed complaining I only 
measured to ridicule his code (but this is hardly the first time hard 
numbers offended someone) and went to ask on Haskell fora on how to make 
the code faster. His second version was:

import Data.List import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as L
main = L.interact $ L.unlines . sort . L.lines

This version took 7 seconds. A debug version of the D code took 3 seconds.

> But I accept your timing.

This is most gracious considering the crass statement with which you opened.

> And I say that it's good :-) We should aim to
> be better than the Intel Labs Haskell Research Compiler (HRC) :-)

Is that a lot better than ghc?


Andrei