[erlang-questions] clueless performance question

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 11 Jun 2008, at 11:57 pm, Mike Shaver wrote:
> It's probably[*] going to be less efficient than early binding on
> first call, but there's no reason that it can't be equivalent to early
> binding on every subsequent call, until a module replacement triggers
> the flushing of a JIT cache or what have you.

The startup costs can be high.  Comparing C code and Java code on my
Sun UltraSPARC II, my C programs have usually *finished* before the
Java code completes startup.
>
>
> Work on tracing JITs indicates that the overhead of late binding can
> be made to disappear completely in the loops and functions that
> comprise virtually all of a program's work -- even in languages that
> don't have Erlang's functional goodness to assist the compilers, and
> permit mutation of objects in more difficult-to-handle ways than
> module reload.

I keep hearing this.  Please provide some references.  Best of all,
point me to something that I can try on my own machines, because all
of the jam tomorrow that I've ever heard about how C++ was going to
be great one day and Java was going to be as fast as C have *never*
panned out into anything I could measure for myself.  (For what it's
worth, I am an admirer of Self and have a copy of Self on my Sun.
Too bad the characters are too tiny for me to read and nobody ever
responded to my questions about how to make them bigger.)

Remember: I am not complaining about Erlang.  I think late binding is
a great thing.  I think Objective C is all the better for being such
a suitable host for F-Script.