Do everything in Java…

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Sun, 2014-12-07 at 21:36 +0000, John Colvin via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]

> Got an example? I'd be interested to see a numerical-code example 
> where the JVM can beat the llvm/gcc backends on a real
> calculation (even if it's a small one).

π by quadrature (it's just a single loop) can show the effect very 
well, though currently anecdotally since I haven't set up proper 
benchmarking even after 7 years of tinkering.

https://github.com/russel/Pi_Quadrature

Of course JVM suffers a JIT warm up which native code languages do not, 
so you have to be careful with single data point comparisons.

As with any of these situation the convoluted hardcoded for a specific 
processor code, especially assembly language will always win. I don't 
care about that, I care about the fastest comprehensible code that is 
portable simply by compilation or execution. Based on this, Java does 
well, so does some Groovy perhaps surprisingly, also Scala.  C++ does 
well especially with TBB (though as an API it leaves a lot to be 
desired). D is OK but only using ldc2 or gdc, dmd sucks. Go has issues 
using gc but gccgo is fine. Rust does very well, but if using Cargo 
for build you have to be careful to use --release. A big winner here 
is Python, but only if you can get Numba working, Cython and Pythran 
for me are a bit icky. On the outside rails is Chapel, which if it 
could get some traction outside HPC would probably wipe the floor with 
all other languages, with X10 a good runner up.

Of course this is just a trivial microbenchmark, you may be looking 
for more real world actual codes.

-- 
Russel.
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