Re: pidigits benchmark

["Mark Meijer" <meijer78@...>]

> 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?

And I'm unimaginative ;-) Sure you can argue that everything is
ultimately native, since everything ultimately translates to
instructions being executed on your CPU. Granted, it can be hard to
draw the line (or impossible, processors exist that execute java
bytecode in hardware, for example). But I still think running
benchmarks of algorithms written completely in a native compiled
library, tells me more about that library than the language used to
invoke it. I started to wonder if you actually disagreed with me on
this, but it appears you are not. See final quotation below.


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

Nobody uses interpreted languages that way, except for the purpose of
benchmarking it (or for prototyping, or for lack of a native library
binding, but I digress). Benchmarks are just that. The questions was,
what are we benchmarking. I wasn't actually looking for an answer to
that. Sorry if I gave the wrong impression.


> I like to see both ;-)

Then you agree the distinction I made is a valid one.

Cheers :-)