On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 10:48:17AM -0500, Bijan Parsia wrote:
> I don't think it does *poorly* by and large. For the first three tests,
> it's within a factor of three.

I agree--I thought Squeak did quite well.  To me, Squeak is closest 
in flavor to Python (even though the languages are quite different
under the hood), and I wanted to see how they compared.

Also, take the benchmarks with a grain of salt--they haven't been reviewed
by anybody yet, so there may be bugs/problems with them.

> Now, speaking totally randomly, I'll point out that whenever you use
> primative types in Java, especially numerics, you'd *better* see a big
> boost in speed, since you won't have to unboxed them. In inner loops this
> can make a big difference (which I hypothozie is why the mandelbrot tests
> show a bigger difference).

Well, for interpreted code, I think boxing is mostly an issue related to
the garbage collector.

Note that cmandelgrid uses user-defined boxed complex numbers in Java;
in some sense, it's the most interesting test.  I think it does so well
still because the JDK has an excellent garbage collector.  What I found
particularly interesting is that g++ didn't manage to make cmandelgrid
equivalent to mandelgrid (far from it, actually) even though in C++,
there is no storage allocation involved.

I may try CMU CL at some point; to me, it represents what a good
open source project can achieve with the compilation of a dynamic
language.

In any case, at some point, I hope I'll be able to give the squeak
jitter a try.

Cheers,
Thomas.