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This is a really terribly done study, with a misleading title to boot. First, even if we take the conclusion as given, "Fortran" isn't faster than "C". The me
by stephencanon 15y ago
This is a really terribly done study, with a misleading title to boot.
First, even if we take the conclusion as given, "Fortran" isn't faster than "C". The median of one set of programs, compiled with one Fortran compiler with one set of options and run on one processor, is faster than the median of another set of programs compiled with one C compiler with one set of one and run on that processor. This tells us approximately nothing.
If you only expand your consideration to include the whole distribution of programs they tested, GCC actually looks better than iFort (eg. there is a single program which ran 2x faster with iFort, but multiple programs ran more than 2x slower). Median is a spectacularly poor choice of metric, especially with so few samples in the distribution.
But also: Intel also makes a C compiler. Why wasn't that used? How were these benchmark programs chosen? Etc.
This study says close to nothing about "Fortran" and "C", or about any of the other languages involved.
- mrgoldenbrown 15y agoThis is a really terrible criticism of the linked page, with a misleading first statement to boot. Where do you see the word study? The title at the top of the page says "Computer Language Benchmarks Game". How is calling it a benchmark game misleading? That's what it is, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else - it is a sorted list of benchmarks run on one particular configuration.
- stephencanon 15y agoThey conducted a series of experiments, and reported their results. If that's not a "study", I don't know what is. The fact that the authors acknowledge that it's a "game" doesn't change that. What is misleading is the title on the link: "Intel Fortran now 20% faster than C".
- igouy 15y agoWhat makes you think the title shown on Hacker News has anything to do with the linked website? Can you find the statement "Intel Fortran now 20% faster than C" anywhere on the linked website? > the authors acknowledge that it's a "game" See http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclusions.php#namegame http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclusions.p...
- gcp 15y agoThis study says close to nothing about "Fortran" and "C", or about any of the other languages involved. Sorry, but I disagree here. It's one of the best resources out there for getting numbers on the relative performance of languages, despite the pitfalls. The implementations of popular languages are well tuned (sometimes extremely so), the used compilers and settings are quite sane, and the benchmark programs are fairly well distributed in functionality. The median is a reasonable choice because it's less sensitive to outliers and was probably chosen for that reason. "Spectacularly poor metric" seems to be an opinion, not a fact. I admit it would have been better to compare Intel C with Intel Fortran. Why wasn't this done? Perhaps some of the submitted programs don't compile correctly with Intel C, or perhaps Intel C doesn't actually perform well on them. Who knows. But to say that this is a "terribly done study" because of that is doing it injustice.
- chalst 15y agoMedian is a bad choice, because it completely ignores just how bad the worst performance holes are for a compiler. Discarding outliers is bad methodology in this case.
- igouy 15y agoThe outliers are not discarded. The outliers are shown both in the chart and in the table (Fortran Intel 25.26). http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php?calc=chart&ifc=on&gcc=on http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...