On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 10:25 AM, David Leimbach <leim...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm still trying to figure out what the point of the shootout really is. If > there's no dedicated folks working with a language there, trying to make > things run faster, a language will come out looking inefficient potentially. > There's a lot of compile flags and optimizations that can make a difference > in probably all of the languages listed on that page.
'Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.' > I guess all you can get from the shootout is a sense of what a particular > language or set of tools is capable of in the hands of the programmers who > submit implementations. It doesn't really give you a concrete idea as to > how to evaluate a programming language. > It does still seem kind of fun for some reason though :-) > Dave The Shootout has a number of valuable purposes: 1) Concrete evidence that language X *can*, somehow, be as fast as language Y 2) Public examples of techniques to do #1, again concrete 3) Exposes where libraries/compilers can do better (this has happened many times with GHC and Haskell libraries) 4) Motivates people to work on creating/fixing #2 and #3 -- gwern _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe