A proper language comparison...

[Chris]

On Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 18:23:19 UTC, Xinok wrote:
> Once in a while, a thread pops up in the newsgroups pitting D 
> against some other language. More often than not, these 
> comparisons are flawed, non-encompassing, and uninformative. 
> Most recently with the article comparing D with Go and Rust, 
> the community pointed out a few flaws involving a late addition 
> of one of the D compilers, build configurations 
> (-noboundscheck?), and the random number generator used.
>
> Then when I think about how web browsers are compared, there 
> are conventional measures and standard benchmarking tools (e.g. 
> sunspider). They measure performance for javascript, rendering, 
> HTML5, etc. They also measure startup times (hot/cold boot), 
> memory usage, etc. Finally, there are feature comparisons, such 
> as what HTML5 features each browser supports.
>
> These are the type of comparisons I'd like to see with 
> programming languages. For starters, there should be standard 
> "challenges" (algorithms and such) implemented in each language 
> designed to measure various aspects of the language, such as 
> sorting, number crunching, and string processing. However, 
> rather than leave it to a single individual to implement the 
> algorithm in several different languages, it should be left to 
> the community to collaborate and produce an "ideal" 
> implementation of the algorithm in their language. We could 
> analyze factors other than performance, such as the ease of 
> implementation (how many lines? does it use safe/unsafe 
> features? Was it optimized using unsafe / difficult features?).
>
>
> What can we do about it? I propose we come together as a 
> community, design challenges that are actually relevant and 
> informative, and release the first implementations in D. Then 
> we let the battle commence and invite other communities to 
> contribute their own implementations in other languages. I 
> think we should give it a try; start off small with just a few 
> moderate challenges (not too simple or complex) and see where 
> it goes from there.

I have learned to be wary of comparisons like that. Any language 
that is sponsored or owned by a big company always "outperforms" 
other languages, and at the end of the day they only want to bind 
you to their products, no matter how "open source" they are. You 
can basically proof whatever you want. Most of the discussions I 
have had don't revolve around whether the language is good or 
not, it's about what people have heard/read, "Who uses it?", 
"I've heard ..." "Someone said ..." I once told a guy about D. He 
said "Ah, D, old-fashioned!" and he showed me a link that said 
"C# has a more modern feature ... bla bla". How ... scientific!