Computer Language Shootout - concurrency

[Peter-Henry Mander]

I wonder if anyone else has tweaked the weighting of the results, like I
did? There are benchmarks where erlang code is missing or broken which
counts heavily against erlang. If you remove these from the ranking, the
results are dramatically better for erlang.

Also, as mentioned here:
http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang-questions/200512/msg00026.html
Some of the benchmarks are tailored so that some strengths of erlang are
*not* demonstrated. I quote:
"We started off using 1500 threads but too many
language implementations failed or timed out."

<rant>

Why is there not another concurrency test with 5000 threads and more
that demonstrate the absolute dominance of erlang? How can the
benchmarks be useful unless they highlight those languages with unique
strengths such as concurrency in erlang? Are there other benchmarks that
have been 'politically-corrected' or 'dumbed-down' to be overly
inclusive?

</rant>

I'm trying to find time to rectify what erlang code I can, but it's a
very low priority. But until _all_ the benchmarks are corrected and
peer-reviewed the ranking is utterly pointless. If anyone cares (and
obviously some of us do) we should extract our proverbial digit and
'fix' the results by submitting better code, and persuade the benchmark
designers to add better and wider-ranging concurrency tests, since
concurrency is becomming a hot topic these days with multicore and cell
processors.

Pete.

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 14:41 +0600, Nic Linker wrote:
> James Hague wrote:
> 
> >>A fly in the ointment - the Ackermann function:
> >>http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=ackermann〈=all
> >>
> >>Erlang HiPE - 15th place. ;-)
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Interpreted Erlang is within 10x of the top, natively compiled
> >benchmark.  It's ahead of GForth, which is one of the fastest
> >interpreters out there (one that doesn't even do dynamic type checks).
> > That's great!
> >  
> >
> But Erlang HiPE is not interpreted and I found natural to compare it
> with other compilable languages, and unfortunately Erlang is not even
> close to the leader, in contrast of what I expected. :-(  (Why did I
> expect it? Because recursion is the one of the strongest features of
> functional languages).
> 
> >And if you compare Erlang to the big scripting languages, then wow do
> >the results looks good: 6x faster than Lua, more than 40x faster than
> >Perl and Python (igoring the not-ready-for-production-use Psyco
> >compiler results
> >
> Yes, I was really glad to see it after :-)
> 
> Best regards,
> Nick Linker
> 
>