Re: pidigits benchmark

[Isaac Gouy <igouy2@...>]

--- Mark Meijer <meijer78@gmail.com> wrote:

> I see your point. But then you're talking about benchmarking some
> library and/or specific bindings for it to other programming
> languages. Useful info, to be sure, but not the same as benchmarking
> those programming languages themselves.

Except when it is the same as benchmarking those programming languages
themselves - when what appears to be an implementation in the
programming language just gets transformed into bindings to a native
library - is it turtles all the way down?


> All languages can be blazingly
> fast if everything you need from it is implemented in native
> libraries. If that is the point of some benchmarking site, no
> problem.
> All I'm saying is there's a clear distinction that tends to be
> overlooked.
> 
> If I needed library X for some project, and I want to find out how
> different bindings to that library perform in different languages,
> then I'm interested in benchmarking those. If I want to compare
> benchmarks of different programming languages in general (if there is
> such a thing - of course there is always a context for one's interest
> in comparing languages, that's basically why benchmarks measure
> different algorithms), then I'm not interested in seeing benchmarks
> that largely measure the performance of some native libraries. I'd
> much rather see those algorithms implemented in pure <insert
> language>
> (e.g. pure lua, pure python, etc) for the purpose of benchmarking
> those languages. To me, that's a big difference.

And be assured that others will say they'd never use the language that
way and would rather see the commonly used native library.

I like to see both ;-)