Language Shootout

[janderson]

David B. Held wrote:
> Dave wrote:
>> Dan Wrote:
>>
>>> Hi guys,
>>>
>>> This idea will only work with Walter in on it.  : p  I was thinking 
>>> that we might go through the various benchmarks in "the language 
>>> shootout" and find out those items where D is significantly behind 
>>> for any reason, and correct the performance.
>>>
>>> For example, against Eiffel, you see their Fasta implementation is 38 
>>> times faster than D's.  Why not compile the code, find out how it 
>>> works and see why D's that much slower - and then Walter can fix the 
>>> code?
>>>
>>
>> Huh? D is a tad better on one machine and just a bit slower on the 
>> other machine (on the Shootout). Maybe there was some sort of problem 
>> on the site when you looked at it?
>>
>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=fasta&lang=all
>>
>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=fasta&lang=all 
>>
> 
> In fact, the D version is written nicely, but the the fastest C++ 
> version is clearly written for speed.  I'm willing to bet that D could 
> close the gap by taking away all classes and using free functions + 
> structs the way the C++ version does.  Anybody up for it?  Since we 
> can't test on the shootout machine itself, improvements should be 
> measured relative to the currently published version.
> 
> Dave

That would be a C verse C comparison.  I don't think that would be of 
much advantage.  I think the C++ version should be OO too (not that we 
can change that).

D really needs to be done in a way that looks like D.  Hopefully, the 
extra overhead can be optimized in other ways.