[ANN] Clue 0.6

[David Given <dg@...>]

After being prodded to finally fix the bit rot that was preventing Clue
0.5 from working, I've just released version 0.6 of my C to Lua,
Javascript, Java and Perl compiler.

http://cluecc.sourceforge.net/

New in this release: a Lua 5.2 dialect target which uses goto.
(Thank-you! Thank-you!) This has more than doubled performance using the
stock Lua interpreter from Lua 5.1, which has to emulate goto using what
amounts to a switch statement.

Of course, LuaJIT falls upon this code with cries of glee.

Backend Interpreter     Whetstone   gcc comparison (larger is better)
(gcc)                   2500        100%
lua     LuaJIT jon      2500        100%
c       gcc             2400         96%
java    Sun Java 6       790         32%
lua     LuaJIT joff      155          6.2%
js      node.js (V8)     110          4.4%
lua     Lua 5.2.1         84          3.4%
lua     Lua 5.1.3         29          1.2%
perl5   Perl 5             2.7        0.11%

Now, don't get too excited; the Whetstone benchmark is wholly synthetic
and not indicative of anything much. But, yes, some of the subbenchmarks
(and some of the other test loads I'm running) *are* running on LuaJIT
faster than they run when compiled directly with gcc (with -Os). I
suspect this is mostly due to loop unrolling, which is a bit unfair.

I'm also running some of the CLBG tests, which are slightly more
real-world (although only slightly). The results of the Mandelbrot test
look a bit more realistic:

               Time       Factor (smaller is better)
gcc            0.098	   1.000
clue -> c      0.149	   1.514
luajit2-jon    0.376	   3.835
java           1.011	  10.299
luajit2-joff   3.487	  35.520
js             4.281	  43.610
lua52          6.454	  65.749
lua51         11.050	 112.566
perl5         42.619	 434.153

If anyone can suggest any more real-world test loads that are worth
trying, I'd like to give them a go --- although bear in mind that Clue's
C environment is *distinctly* weird, although mostly
standards-compliant, and the runtime library is almost non-existent.

-- 
┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ─────
│ "Of course, on a sufficiently small planet, 40 km/hr is, in fact,
│ sufficient to punt the elastic spherical cow into low orbit." ---
│ Brooks Moses on r.a.sf.c

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