[Shootout-list] Safety vs. speed

[Peter Hinely]

Hi,

> Any language with a C FFI is unsafe.

Have I not been talking about the tests themselves?  It's not whether a
language is unsafe, it's whethere the benchmark entry in that language
compiled with whatever flags it was compiled with is unsafe.

As I mentioned before *each* entry could have flags for different aspects
of safeness.  If a particular entry used an C FFI, then that entry would
be marked type unsafe.

In Dylan, one can disable bounds checking on a line-by-line basis.  If a
Dylan entry for a particular test disabled bounds-checking, that entry
would be marked "bounds-checking unsafe".

>> For integers:  Whether integers silently overflow or not.

> This is orthogonal to what you said above.

That's why I put it in a different paragraph.  I don't get your point. Any
non-trivial program is going to use integers (and maybe wrongly assume
that no overflow has occurred).

To me, knowledge of the speed of a language without regard to its safeness
is not very useful.  Why would I want to switch from C (which I know is
fast) to language X, unless langauge X performs almost as well as C,
*plus* language X provides additional safety?

Regards,
Peter