[Shootout-list] thoughts on the subject of ''compile to native code''

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Bengt Kleberg wrote:
>
> neither do i find it useful to list both compiled and
> interpreted times
> for the same language (implementation) on the main page.

What do you call 'same implementation' ?  OCaml has completely separate
bytecode and native code compilers, for instance.  They are so separate
that you can't intermix them.  They have different names, ocamlc and
ocamlopt.  The only way they're the 'same language implementation' is
they come from the same guys and are always distributed together.

I think the performance differences between compiled and interpreted
code are definitely worth knowing on a main page.  I would like to know,
for instance, how slow interpreted Python is, compared to bytecode
compiled Python, compared to Python with Psyco run on it.  Those are
major categories of Python usage, not subtleties of particular
optimization flags.

I understand the problem of proliferating options.  Listing languages by
performance partially alleviates this.

I don't think every variation in compile flags should be listed on a
main page.  But I do think the "compiled vs. interpreted" distinction is
an important one, demanding different entries.  You are going to see
large differences in performance; indeed, my conclusion from the
original Shootout was that all the compiled languages were in the same
ballpark of performance.  All the interpreted languages were in a clump
below them.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.