[ocaml-biz] winning the Shootout

[William D. Neumann]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> So, we *definitely* need a political presence in the Shootout.  People
> making sure the OCaml code is good.  People making sure the other
> entrants aren't cheating, or misreporting results.  People making sure
> the Shootout actually works and actually reports what it says it
> reports.  People conditioning and massaging the testing criteria towards
> OCaml's favor.  Or at least, making sure the results aren't massaged,
> either accidentally or deliberately, towards some other language's
> favor.

A couple of things:
   1: Whoever is running the shootout knows about the problem with C#, as
      is shown by these two posts to the shootout mailing list.
      <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/shootout-list/2004-June/000025.html>
      <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/shootout-list/2004-August/000090.html>
      However, they haven't taken tose bogus results out of C#'s entries in
      the scorecard -- that needs to be fixed.

   2: I haven't looked at all the OCaml code, but most of it is very good.
      It seems like a lot of it was optimized by Markus Mottl who writes
      some very nice code.  It might be possible to improve some of the LOC
      counts, but I'm not sure there's a lot of room for speedup in there.

   3: What might be best is to propse a few new tests to add to the
      benchmark suite.  Preferably something more sustantial than these
      stale and boring micro-benchmarks.  That ought to really let OCaml's
      expressiveness, power, and speed shine.

William D. Neumann

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