[Shootout-list] Re: Coding For Speed

[Robert Seeger]

No, but it does claim to be a way to differentiate between the speed
and capabilities of different languages. When looking at a test for
which a given language performs poorly, I think it would be useful to
see answers to questions like:
* Is this just a failing of the language? or,
* What approach DOES work in this language for solving this type of problem?

When looking at a Perl or Tcl program, it may take huge huge number of
lines of code to implement certain functionality, and be very slow.
However, when using CPAN or the AS Tcl dist, it can be done with a
simple "package require" (thats Tcl, not sure on the syntax for Perl),
and may be remarkably faster (C-level extensions).

Unicode is another example of this. I know there's not currently a
test for it, but... There are a lot of languages that currently just
can't do Unicode, or do it poorly or incorrectly. However, by using a
commonly available external library, they can work with it just fine.
Given that Unicode support is a common real world need, using these
libraries is fairly normal.

Rob Seeger


On Sun, 27 Mar 2005 06:36:48 -0800 (PST), Isaac Gouy <igouy2@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Robert Seeger <rhseeger@gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's not so much interesting because it's nifty, but interesting
> > because it's an "if you were really going to calculate this in this
> > language, this is how you'd do it" alternative.
> 
> Leaving aside whether we actually would choose a simple iterative
> approach (memoising?) - the Shootout doesn't claim to be a library of
> well designed programs based on good algorithms.
> 
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