how to interpret these results ?

[James Hague]

On 7/20/06, Ryan Rawson <ryanobjc@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> Apparently for hardcore numerical computations C is better.  Most of
> those algorithms seem to be of that nature.  The one where erlang did
> well was entitled 'cheap concurrency'.

Even so, Erlang often does surprisingy well for algorithms that are
more than just doing lots of math on a large data set.  Sometimes
working symbolically with leads to higher-level optimizations.
Garbage collection helps a lot.  Ditto for having match expressions
automatically compiled down to a minimum set of comparisons.

You might like this article:
http://www.dadgum.com/james/performance.html

Personally, it's good to see Erlang beating Python and Ruby by quite a
bit on many raw processing power benchmarks.

Something else to consider is that it's easy to tweak many of these
benchmarks to spawn processes for various computations, and then all
of a sudden you're going to see massive speedups on multi-core
machines.