Pitiful benchmark performance

[James Hague]

Sean Hinde wrote:
>
> Now I know that benchmarks are not representative etc etc but they do
> encapsulate quite a few common idioms and there shouldn't be 
> a good reason
> for Erlang to do so badly. Maybe the HIPE guys can use (are 
> using?) these in
> their investigations into optimal GC schemes etc for R8?

Networking aside, some of these benchmarks are just plain bad.  The List
Operations benchmark involves accessing lists from both ends.  Naturally,
naive implementations of this are going to suffer in functional languages,
and languages that implement "lists" as arrays (like Perl) are going to do
better.  Some of the others involve calls to lists:append inside inner
loops.

While it would be nice for Erlang to have a better showing--Bagley's page
has gotten a lot of attention--I think these benchmarks are too trivial to
be of much value.  What *is* heartening though, is that Erlang still beats
Python in most cases :)

James