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

Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 90 posts

Re: Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

#21

Post by xiphias2 »

Looking at the Julia implementation fast math wasn't used. In my experience it's usually worth experimenting with turning it on (also of course for the other LLVM based languages), though I understand that this benchmark tries to keep the program correct at all costs.

Re: Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

#22

Post by Narishma »

iainmerrick wrote: post #11

The most impressive result here is Lua -- not far behind C! LuaJIT is amazing. Good to see a few languages like Nim and Rust actually beating C for raw performance, too.

You should look again. Lua seems to be the slowest of the bunch.

Re: Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

#23

Post by krull10 »

kenhwang wrote: post #14

Ordered by realtime, fastest to slowest for those like me who got annoyed by the scrolling up and down trying to compare: Rust (1.13.0-nightly) 1m32.392s Nim (0.14.2) 1m53.320s C 1m59.116s Julia (0.4.6) 2m01.166s Crystal (0.18.7) 2m01.735s C Double Precision 2m26.546s Java (1.7.0_111) 2m36.949s Nim Double Precision (0.14.2) 3m19.547s OCaml 3m59.597s Go 1.6 6m44.151s node.js (6.2.1) 7m59.041s node.js (5.7.1) 8m49.170s…

I wouldn’t give much weight to those benchmark numbers at this point. Some of those language versions are quite out of date...

Re: Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

#24

Post by weberc2 »

kenhwang wrote: post #14

Ordered by realtime, fastest to slowest for those like me who got annoyed by the scrolling up and down trying to compare: Rust (1.13.0-nightly) 1m32.392s Nim (0.14.2) 1m53.320s C 1m59.116s Julia (0.4.6) 2m01.166s Crystal (0.18.7) 2m01.735s C Double Precision 2m26.546s Java (1.7.0_111) 2m36.949s Nim Double Precision (0.14.2) 3m19.547s OCaml 3m59.597s Go 1.6 6m44.151s node.js (6.2.1) 7m59.041s node.js (5.7.1) 8m49.170s…

That's a big jump between OCaml and Go. I'm not familiar with ray tracing, but skimming the source code it mostly looks like it's doing floating point math; it doesn't look like it's using the runtime (no allocations, no virtual function calls, no scheduling, etc), so I'm surprised that Go is performing relatively poorly.

I wonder if the performance gap is attributable to some overhead in Go's function calls? I know Go passes parameters on the stack instead of via registers... Maybe it's due to passing struct copies instead of references (looks like the C version passes references)? Generally poor code generation?

Anyone else have ideas or care to profile?

EDIT: From my 2015 MBP, Go (version 1.12) is indeed quite a lot slower than C, but only if you're doing an optimized build `-03`:

    tmp $  time ./gorb
    real    1m15.128s
    user    1m9.366s
    sys     0m6.754s

    tmp $  clang crb.c
    tmp $  time ./a.out
    real    1m13.041s
    user    1m10.284s
    sys     0m0.624s

    tmp $  gcc crb.c -o crb -std=c11 -O3 -lm -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600
    tmp $  time ./crb
    real    0m22.703s
    user    0m22.550s
    sys     0m0.073s

    tmp $  clang crb.c -o crb -std=c11 -O3 -lm -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600
    tmp $  time ./crb
    real    0m22.689s
    user    0m22.564s
    sys     0m0.060s
EDIT2: I re-modified the Go version (https://gist.github.com/weberc2/2aed4f8d3189d09067d564448367...) to pass references and that seems to put it on par with C (or I mistranslated, which is also likely):

    $ time ./gorb 
    real    0m19.282s
    user    0m14.467s
    sys     0m7.523s

Re: Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

#25

Post by iainmerrick »

ddlutz wrote: post #18
wlesieutre wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I reading it wrong or did LuaJIT take 113x as long as C?

It sure looks that slow to me.

Ha, you’re right, I totally misread it! I read it as seconds and not minutes, doh. :)

Re: Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

#26

Post by iainmerrick »

Narishma wrote: post #22
iainmerrick wrote: post #11

The most impressive result here is Lua -- not far behind C! LuaJIT is amazing. Good to see a few languages like Nim and Rust actually beating C for raw performance, too.

You should look again. Lua seems to be the slowest of the bunch.

Whoops, yes, you’re right!

Now I’m tempted to try speeding it up, there’s no way it should be behind Python...

Re: Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project

#29

Post by kenhwang »

krull10 wrote: post #23
kenhwang wrote: post #14

Ordered by realtime, fastest to slowest for those like me who got annoyed by the scrolling up and down trying to compare: Rust (1.13.0-nightly) 1m32.392s Nim (0.14.2) 1m53.320s C 1m59.116s Julia (0.4.6) 2m01.166s Crystal (0.18.7) 2m01.735s C Double Precision 2m26.546s Java (1.7.0_111) 2m36.949s Nim Double Precision (0.14.2) 3m19.547s OCaml 3m59.597s Go 1.6 6m44.151s node.js (6.2.1) 7m59.041s node.js (5.7.1) 8m49.170s…

I wouldn’t give much weight to those benchmark numbers at this point. Some of those language versions are quite out of date...

I would imagine current versions would only give the newer, actively developed languages a boost like Rust, Nim, Crystal, and Go. Java and C I don't see improving moving much.
Post reply on HN