E
Erwin Moller
Has It been greatly improved?
A
ara howard
T
ThoML
The shootout gives a hint:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all
How these charts relate to real-world problems ... oh well, but it's
fun to play with.
S
Simon Krahnke
* Erwin Moller said:
Yes!
I've foolishly done a small raytracer in pure ruby, and here are some
older timing results:
1.11 scene5 hdr
real 240m0.358s
user 229m33.500s
sys 5m16.590s
1.12 scene5 hdr (ruby1.9)
real 159m57.246s
user 156m15.050s
sys 0m30.360s
(Yeah, it's version 1.11 vs version 1.12, but 1.12 just fixes bugs.)
mfg, simon .... l
E
Eleanor McHugh
It's interesting to see that Ruby 1.9 is now faster than Icon, which
is my other fave language (and who's VM I'm far too familiar with).
Ellie
Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
J
James Gray
I've always wanted to try that.
MJD has a neat little raytracer in Perl. I think it's 400 lines, or so.
Is your code publicly available?
James Edward Gray II=
S
Simon Krahnke
* James Gray said:
Well, rayt (that's its short name) is quite basic and limited, there are
only two different object types: planes (with no borders) and spheres. I
only ever tried grayscale images and it's just plain raytracing with
reflection and transparency.
I consider it quite finished, because pure raytracing with its shadow
rays it's just too bad at distributing light, and can always learn to
use povray. I might try to implement refraction some day though.
No, but I could zip it up and mail it to you if you want.
mfg, simon .... my address works
I
Isaac Gouy
Much the same rather than faster (and there are many missing Icon
programs)
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=icon&lang2=yarv
I
Isaac Gouy
Here's a direct comparison -
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=ruby
(Note that some of the Ruby 1.8.6 programs show Error when run with
Ruby 1.9.0)
E
Eleanor McHugh
Well there's lots of room for improvement in the Icon VM, what with
the current design being fifteen years old and written in its own god-
awful macro language that adds additional overhead. On the other hand,
I did significant physical simulations using it on an i386 for my
degree dissertation and never found it particularly slow so if Ruby
1.9 is in the same ballpark now that's a good improvement.
As for the lack of Icon benchmarks, well judging from the activity on
the Unicon mailing list I'd be surprised if there's more than a few
hundred of us worldwide who ever use it. Makes Ruby look positively
mainstream
Ellie
Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
M
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
Eleanor said:Well there's lots of room for improvement in the Icon VM, what with the
current design being fifteen years old and written in its own god-awful
macro language that adds additional overhead. On the other hand, I did
significant physical simulations using it on an i386 for my degree
dissertation and never found it particularly slow so if Ruby 1.9 is in
the same ballpark now that's a good improvement.
As for the lack of Icon benchmarks, well judging from the activity on
the Unicon mailing list I'd be surprised if there's more than a few
hundred of us worldwide who ever use it. Makes Ruby look positively
mainstream
The main use of it that I'm aware of is in the build process for Norman
Ramsey's "noweb" literate programming tool. Ralph Griswold, the creator
of Icon (and SNOBOL!) passed away last year, and I don't know if anyone
has stepped into a maintainer role.
E
Eleanor McHugh
Yes, I was very sad when the news broke as he was one of my personal
heroes, both for his work on Icon and for the important role he played
in the birth of Unix and other Bell Labs projects. He was ahead of the
curve with both Snobol and Icon but the elegant scanning environments
these championed have never gained the traction of regular expressions
(much to my personal annoyance) nor has Icon's goal-oriented
evaluation. I often miss the latter when working on Ruby problems and
end up spoofing it with exceptions, which is a very clumsy approach.
I don't know who's now maintaining Icon, but its OO offshoot Unicon is
be actively developed by Clinton Jeffreys and has a small but loyal
community. It's fun to play with and even has support for graphics and
CGI these days - I used to have a couple of websites powered by it
before they fell off the net - but outside of noweb Un/Icon lacks a
killer application to put it in the mainstream.
No matter how good the language, without users it's always going to be
stuck in a niche
Ellie
Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net