Optimizations and performance

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 9 June 2016 at 15:16:34 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 at 13:56:37 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 at 13:52:38 UTC, Dave wrote:
>>> But it is the point of benchmarking
>>
>> So it's not "languages should be fast by default", but 
>> "benchmarks should be fast by default"?
>
> Well, _this_ took some weird leaps from what I actually said...
>
> The point is this sort of language benchmark should use normal 
> code.  The sort of code that people who've never heard of 
> Haskell would write.

Well, the golden rule is to benchmark big applications, not 
synthetic benchmarks as they tend not to reflect real world usage 
(and you end up with compilers special case the bench marks in 
the optimizer). However, that makes comparison of compilers for 
different languages impossible.

Also, with concurrent languages things gets messy. Most people 
would write single-threaded code, but some languages/compilers 
will automatically give you multi-threaded code. Is that fair? 
Yes, if you focus on productivity. No, if you focus on what is 
possible.