Just to be clear I'll list a few for the record. He's got them there to avoid the flames and claims of "unfair".
- All artificial language performance benchmarks, mine included, *do not measure real-world performance*. One should not choose a language based only on its benchmark ranking, even if you believe the benchmark to be fair. In an ideal world, we would choose the language that makes us most productive, and which can be optimized fairly easily, when that optimization is needed. That means a good language will include a profiler tool to allow you to measure which parts of your application are slow, so you can rewrite those parts to be faster. Many scripting languages allow you to rewrite the slow parts in C, which should be just about all you need for speed. Of course, a badly designed application may be difficult to profile and speed up. But that's the fault of the programmer, not the language. And another - Some languages are not tested on their strengths, but mostly on their weaknesses. Case in point: PHP. PHP is a fine web scripting language that provides a multitude of built-in convenience functions to simplify writing code for common CGI tasks. Since this shootout is a basic language test, and I don't have or plan to have any CGI scripting tests, the fact that PHP is somewhat slower in my tests than other scripting languages is hardly an argument against its use as a web scripting language. - You should keep in mind that you may get significantly different results on a different platform. http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/method.shtml#flaws for a long list, then read disclaimer then read faq I think and by then you'll have read more disclaimers then folks ranting here have thought of or had time to say. Hopefully this will avoid the Omega-13 :) - August ----- Original Message ----- From: "Zeev Suraski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "August Zajonc" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2001 3:51 PM Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] Re: Shootout > I have to say that taking a look at his site again - he does have > disclaimers. Even though none is as strong as 'This may have nothing to do > with reality', it's not that bad... > > At 01:49 30/12/2001, Mike Robinson wrote: > >Zeev Suraski writes: > > > > > Well, I think that benchmarking PHP like that out of any context > > > is *bound* to result in many people getting the wrong ideas. So, a big > >disclaimer > > > reading "This may not necessarily have any real world meaning" was due. > > > >You betcha, wrong ideas.... > >I was about to activate the Omega-13. ;) > > > >Regards > >Mike Robinson > > -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
