Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 132 posts

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#81

Post by acdha »

collyw wrote: post #77
thinkindie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is something a bit naive - basically all dynamic languages have the same low barrier and can produce the same crappy code, see for example javascript or ruby (with RoR). Python too, considering the fact that it's used by a lot of people that their main job is not software engineering. The biggest difference between PHP and the other dynamic languages, though, is that PHP came out with pretty popular stuff like w…

Python is as easy to write as PHP, but deploying it as a web app is a whole different story.

That comparison is complicated: it's definitely easy to drop a .php file on a server but once you start talking about frameworks, using a newer version than your OS distribution shipped, adding C extensions, etc. it's easy to find counter-examples, and the Go proponents are not wrong to observe that deploying a single file is easier than either.

This is also becoming less of a distinguishing factor in the container era where the answer for a number of cases is “Extend a base Docker image”.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#82

Post by acdha »

rurban wrote: post #78
weberc2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pypy is considerably faster than CPython, so I don't think Python is doomed to be slower?

pypy changed not only the vm, but also the internal data structures. It's totally different. pypy's problem is that is only optimizes loops and often called functions, not the general interpretation, as e.g. PHP7 or lua did. For normal, simple small scripts it's not that big a benefit, and you loose all the extensions, (though that's being worked on).

That has been less true for the last few years: C extensions are still a concern, although many of the major ones work now, but I've had a significant number of programs run faster simply by using pypy. It's a full JIT compiler and one nice area that improves is regex handling so all of my log-related work got faster with zero effort.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#83

Post by tyingq »

olegkikin wrote: post #79
FrozenVoid wrote: post #48

Years ago i was naive enough to believe these benchmarks. Now i know these are Potemkin-village level stunts and political maneuvering by language activists and staff of that site. If you really want actual benchmarking you have to do it yourself and read the .asm output for comparison. Another caveat is that some languages are genuinely faster in one hyperoptimized case(even faster than C) but fail horribly when thi…

You provided zero evidence for your claim. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but so far you have only made an assertion. If you think some language is misrepresented in that benchmark, you can submit your own solution.

I had the same observation. I'm a Perl fan, but I can see some submissions were solely motivated to make Perl appear competitive. Like using threads in Perl, which isn't often done in real life.

I'm not sure how much evidence is needed. It seems obvious that people who are fans of language X are going to submit code with the sole intention of bumping up performance at any cost.

The site is still interesting, but probably useless for real world decision making.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#84

Post by tyingq »

Xoros wrote: post #8

So PHP is faster on most of those test than python or ruby ? I'm I missing something ? I thought everyone hating PHP ( also) because it was slow.

> I thought everyone hating PHP ( also) because it was slow

Most of the replies here are stating that PHP is fast. It can be for these kind of benchmarks.

But, it does have the reputation you're suggesting. That reputation, though, is based on the old CGI model. Most php apps are built in a way that all of the initiation and setup code is run for every single request. That makes it comparatively slow.

Some PHP apps get around that by using a shared memory cache, like apcu, to box around that. That helps a lot, but isn't the same as a typical golang or node.js app where startup code is truly run once, and new requests go through a much shorter path.

All of that, though, is less a "language" thing and more of a runtime thing. You can, for example, use Facebook's HHVM+Proxygen and run PHP code in the exact same way as node.js.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#85

Post by jaredklewis »

olegkikin wrote: post #79
FrozenVoid wrote: post #48

Years ago i was naive enough to believe these benchmarks. Now i know these are Potemkin-village level stunts and political maneuvering by language activists and staff of that site. If you really want actual benchmarking you have to do it yourself and read the .asm output for comparison. Another caveat is that some languages are genuinely faster in one hyperoptimized case(even faster than C) but fail horribly when thi…

You provided zero evidence for your claim. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but so far you have only made an assertion. If you think some language is misrepresented in that benchmark, you can submit your own solution.

The problem is subjective and thus more difficult to provide evidence for.

I don't think the parent doubts the runtimes or is claiming that the code for his pet language wasn't written properly and therefore the site is a sham. The issue is: what is reasonable code?

Benchmarks invariably become a game of massaging the code to produce the optimal assembly. And that's the problem. The reason that we invented higher level languages was so we could stop thinking about assembly. The point of most higher level languages is not to optimize CPU cycles, but to optimize human brain cycles. If we only cared about speed (and not at all about development time), we would just write all code in assembly.

I am not particularly interested in how fast meticulously fine tuned code in a given language runs. I have no doubt that, given enough time, an excellent programmer can finely craft a block of code to run very fast in any half decent language. And this site is evidence of that.

What I want to know, and what benchmarks never show, is which languages make writing performant code simple, idiomatic, and natural. Which languages give me good performance, without having to really work for it?

This is an amazing site, but it is a stretch to think that it compares languages. It compares programmers and their implementations. The implementations are more like their own art form, like Chess or something.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#86

Post by SwellJoe »

cygx wrote: post #74
SwellJoe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody that I'm aware of has ever hated PHP because it was slow. They hated it for a variety of other reasons.

Just like JavaScript, PHP used to be slow. Then, large amounts of effort and/or money were spent into making them not so.

My somewhat glib comment was meant to point out that even had PHP been very fast back when PHP hate was a popular past time it would still have been hated for other reasons.

Ruby was (very) slow back then (notably and measurably slower than PHP, Python, or Perl) and people still loved it. The warts on PHP that got the most bad press were rarely related to performance.

So, yes PHP used to be slower than it is today, by a lot. But, speed wouldn't have immunized it against the criticism leveled against it. All the effort going into fixing performance for PHP coincided with fixing some of the bigger warts of the language, as well...so much of the hate for PHP has dwindled in recent years.

The fact that people building for the web are much less often required to work in PHP also reduces the hate.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#87

Post by igouy »

SwellJoe wrote: post #9

Hey, the benchmark game got a new website (at some point in the several years since I looked at it last)! Almost simplistic, but nice to read. As someone that works predominantly in a language long considered passé (Perl), I always kinda relish seeing that it is still faster than Python and Ruby for many problems. As Python and Ruby have gotten faster, I'd sort of assumed they were both notably and clearly faster tha…

>> new website Dec 2015. Pleased you find it nice to read.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#88

Post by segmondy »

FrozenVoid wrote: post #48

Years ago i was naive enough to believe these benchmarks. Now i know these are Potemkin-village level stunts and political maneuvering by language activists and staff of that site. If you really want actual benchmarking you have to do it yourself and read the .asm output for comparison. Another caveat is that some languages are genuinely faster in one hyperoptimized case(even faster than C) but fail horribly when thi…

How do you read an asm output for PHP, python, erlang, Lua, Java, JavaScript?

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#89

Post by igouy »

rurban wrote: post #56
SwellJoe wrote: post #9

Hey, the benchmark game got a new website (at some point in the several years since I looked at it last)! Almost simplistic, but nice to read. As someone that works predominantly in a language long considered passé (Perl), I always kinda relish seeing that it is still faster than Python and Ruby for many problems. As Python and Ruby have gotten faster, I'd sort of assumed they were both notably and clearly faster tha…

Perl is only faster here in nbody because I tricked it. I used a tricky compile-time optimization for faster array index access. You wouldn't do that in the real world, and in the real world PHP, ruby and python are faster. cperl instead is only beaten by PHP. But the benchmark game is not open for faster alternate engines like luajit, nim, crystal, pypy, truffle-graal, ... or even slower ones like Perl6, which limit…

>> a tricky compile-time optimization for faster array index access. And you even comment on that usage in your code.

>> Decades ago it was open and written in Perl. Then it was rewritten in Python and closed down. Go figure. At best your comment is disingenuous.

You can download the Python measurement scripts, use them with luajit, nim, crystal, pypy, truffle-graal or Perl6 programs and publish the measurements.

You don't. Go figure.

Re: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

#90

Post by segmondy »

tyingq wrote: post #83
olegkikin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You provided zero evidence for your claim. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but so far you have only made an assertion. If you think some language is misrepresented in that benchmark, you can submit your own solution.

I had the same observation. I'm a Perl fan, but I can see some submissions were solely motivated to make Perl appear competitive. Like using threads in Perl, which isn't often done in real life. I'm not sure how much evidence is needed. It seems obvious that people who are fans of language X are going to submit code with the sole intention of bumping up performance at any cost. The site is still interesting, but prob…

Doesn't matter, if you don't use threads in Perl when you could, that's your fault and benchmarks like this serve to remind you should. There are folks who use threads with their Perl code in real life btw
Post reply on HN