Re: Energy Benchmarks

[Hugo Musso Gualandi <hgualandi@...>]

>> Frankly, that tells me more about the level of competence of the team
>> who conducted the study than about the languages involved.
>> 
>> -- Dirk
>
>Indeed
>Looking at the performance numbers (C is 1.0 vs lua at 83...) makes me
>agree.

Thr benchmarks in this study were taken from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game set, which has some known peculiarities. For example, many examples measure library speed more than language speed. Nevertheless, this set of benchmarks continues to be very popular for this kind of study, due to its breadth. Nothing comes as close to including as many languages as the CLBG.

As for the unusual C vs Lua difference, most of the Lua benchmarks were written by competent programmers, including Mike Pall. If anything it is the C code that is too optimized here. C benchmark implementations in the CLBG are often an unreadable mix of calls to compiler intrinsics, SIMD instructions, and parallelization primitives. This kind of code can easily be an order of magnitude faster than the usual idiomatic C alternative.