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Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

blog.clifreeder.com

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Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#171

Post by Lonny_Eachus »

Lonny_Eachus wrote: post #133
ClifReeder wrote: post #45

Hey everyone, thanks for all the input on this. As I mentioned in the post, programming competitions aren't my forte, and I have a lot to learn in that arena. All the feedback on how this should have been done more efficiently is great. In the future, I obviously need to work on coming up with better algorithms for solving these kinds of problems, but I'll probably continue to try and use Go because it's nice to have…

Just a suggestion, but I would also give some thought to efficient coding style, not just algorithms. For example, you could have speeded up your I/O dramatically.

Correction:

I benchmarked the I/O improvement I was thinking about. It actually only resulted in an improvement of about 30%. Worthwhile, probably, but not as "dramatic" as I thought it would be. Mea culpa.

Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#172

Post by geedy »

davidw wrote: post #130
geedy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, would you call University education dicking around as well? Seems to me challenging the brain is never a waste of time. We would not have some of the medical technologies we have today if it were not for massively parallel GPUs, which of course were developed for the sole purpose of playing games.

> would you call University education dicking around as well? That's a big debate! For a lot of people, I would, though, yes. There are serious economists who posit that universities are mostly about signalling, rather than actually learning much. I don't think I agree with that entirely, and believe it depends a lot on what's studied. It also depends on the opportunity costs, which may not be that high for many peop…

> That's a big debate! For a lot of people, I would, though, yes. There are serious economists who posit that universities are mostly about signalling, rather than actually learning much. I don't think I agree with that entirely, and believe it depends a lot on what's studied. It also depends on the opportunity costs, which may not be that high for many people that age.

Fair enough. For myself, it was what lead me to my career. I found a large number exams followed a similar format to this very coding competition. Many times on the job I have thought back on exam questions for inspiration for the problems I was solving. In that sense, I most definitely do not classify my education as "dicking around".

It brings be to my original point; when video games were being developed, these admitted benefits were certainly not obvious at the time. We simply wanted to render things faster, and at higher resolutions. Now other applications of the same technology is ubiquitous in many regards.

As a final tangential point, I don't think the code competition is wasteful because it does not have any immediate intrinsic value. See exams example above, and really, the discussion here. Also, perhaps this was his so called "downtime". Many people would argue that not all facets of our life should be strictly geared towards productivity. He may already run a business or hold a day job (maybe his blog gives clues otherwise, I don't know).

Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#173

Post by mitchi »

tonycoco wrote: post #167

This whole, "Ruby is slow," diatribe is just ridic. Everyone here that has done any C/C++ or Ruby development would probably agree that if you're looking for number smashing, Ruby is just not cutting it unless you're into rockin' C extensions and getting what you want... for now. Ruby, within a few years, will probably have some VM action, whether the JVM with JRuby or Rubinius wins out, who cares. In any case, in li…

Tim Sweeney predicted that we'd all have 20 core machines with 80 hardware threads by 2009. Not really what happened. The whole point is that while Ruby is nice, it's just too slow. Someone is better off investing time learning a faster compiled/JIT language.

Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#174

Post by mitchi »

vidarh wrote: post #160
jthol wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and the Java programmer laughs in the corner (Let's not talk about generics though).

... of the asylum he's been committed to after having to deal with one too many AbstractFactoryFactory classes.

That's Design Patterns code. I'm sure that if I start programming seriously in Java, I can bring all the readability of C with me!

Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#175

Post by evolve2k »

chc wrote: post #121
bvdbijl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, in a competition you want a language that had as little magic as possible. Languages like Ruby (not necessarily dynamic languages!) are just not really suitable for it

This seems like such a vague, insubstantial piece of advice. I've seen it before, but never in a more concrete form. I don't see any "magic" in Ruby. How do I determine if a language is magic? Usually, the best I can figure is that they're either confusing syntax with semantics or they're actually thinking of some library like ActiveRecord rather than Ruby. Really, for pretty much anything I could conceivably think o…

I think the misunderstanding comes from people confusing Rails with Ruby.

Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#177

Post by yen223 »

hayksaakian wrote: post #7

* competitions based on speed of computation. I'm sure if the competition was based on speed of implementation there would be different conclusions.

It is, in a sense. The later rounds only give you 2.5 hours to implement and execute your solution to the problems. Thing is, you are competing against folks who can write complex C++ algos in under 10 minutes!

Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#178

Post by lmm »

bvdbijl wrote: post #36
nikic wrote: post #20

I also come to the conclusion that Ruby-like languages are just not the right tool for this kind of problem, but it should be pointed out that you would have been able to solve the 10^14 data set easily, even with Ruby. I was solving that problem with PHP and got it running reasonably fast (1s per range) for ranges up to around 10^60. PHP is probably faster than Ruby, but it's still in the same area. The first trick…

Yep, in a competition you want a language that had as little magic as possible. Languages like Ruby (not necessarily dynamic languages!) are just not really suitable for it

On the contrary, the biggest downside of magic comes in maintainability. So languages with more magic are more appropriate for competitions than for regular code.

Re: Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

#179

Post by yen223 »

jt2190 wrote: post #10

The article doesn't actually say that performance was one of the judging criteria, and I'm unable to find anything in the code jam rules about this. Can anyone here clarify?

Not for the qualification rounds, but in later rounds, the winner is the person who gets the most number of points first. It won't come to any surprise that the finals tend to be dominated by C++.
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