[ocaml-biz] strategy bullet point list

[William D. Neumann]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Brian Hurt wrote:

> I comment that in terms of memory used, Ocaml scores 43.4 while C# scores
> 11.1, and in terms of lines of code, Ocaml scores 45.8 while C# scores
> 26.4.  If absolute speed (and minimal memory usage) is needed, you want C.
> Note that even C++ is signifigantly slower than C.

Oh sure.  If you bring LOC and/or memory usage into the equation at all, 
OCaml jumps up right behind C (or C and C++ depending on how you futz with 
the settings).  I'm just saying that if we are going to claim that C# 
doesn't deliver performance, there's going to be plenty of people replying 
with, "Well over at the Shootout...", and we ought to have a counterpoint.

I agree that something seems odd -- taking a quick peek at the shootout 
pages, I see that if you look at the results for the benchmarks for CPU 
minus startup, all of the scores[1] for csharp are 0.00 seconds, while the 
CPU + startup time is always hovering between 0.05 and 0.065 seconds, so 
you might be right in saying that no computation is actually being done 
(either that or there's some bogus data that's being used to create the 
pages...).
E.g. look at <http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/bench/ackermann/> 
vs. <http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/bench/ackermann/?cpu-s>

This also becomes more apparent when you look at e.g. 
<http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/bench/ackermann/detail.php?csharp=on&g%2B%2B=on&gcc=on&ocaml=on>, 
where the time to compute Ackermann's function doesn't change (in any real 
way) as the input parameter varies.  Yeah... something funky is going on 
with that data.

[1] Notable exceptions are Hello World, Producer/Consumer Threads, and 
Reverse a File (though csharp clocks in here in the front of the pack with 
this one at 0.01 seconds).
Lists (both singly and double linked) may also fit into this category, 
but their pages just wouldn't load.. There are also some tests that don't 
have any score for csharp even though the scorcard says that all of them 
are done...


William D. Neumann

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