4 ms·

Oh, man, this reminds me of the pain of writing even the most trivial microbenchmarks in seven or eight languages. How about throwing in some of the fast script

Oh, man, this reminds me of the pain of writing even the most trivial microbenchmarks in seven or eight languages. How about throwing in some of the fast scripting languages for healthy competition? E.g. JavaScript, LuaJIT and Julia. Feel free to borrow (MIT licensed, but I'm willing to relicense whatever I can): https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/master/test/perf/micro https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/master/test/perf/mic...

munificent 13y ago
I'm certainly impressed by those implementations, but I don't think I'm competing with them. :) I had JS (using node) in there for a while, but it was regularly 10x compared to the other languages. Using a JIT makes it effectively a different class of implementation. It's like entering a car in a bike race. Thanks for the benchmarks! I might steal some of those. They may be more arithmetic focused than I need (which makes sense for Julia, but less sense for an embedding scripting language where most math is probably done in the host app).
- StefanKarpinski 13y ago
  It was a turn of phrase, but really I just meant that in my experience it's healthy to have something to aspire to – that's why we always compare to fully optimized C and Fortran. It's easy to fall into an "interpreter bubble" and forget that there's a whole other realm of performance out there. And of course, interpreters can be quite fast – CPython is no slouch and Wren is giving it a run for its money, so kudos. Femtolisp [1] (which we use for Julia's parser) is a great example of a small and simple, yet fast and featureful interpreter. I really want Jeff to write a little book about it, walking the reader through the implementation. [1] https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp
  - munificent 13y ago
    > I just meant that in my experience it's healthy to have something to aspire to I had actually thought that's what I was doing when I compared it to Lua! I was quite surprised at how well Wren did in comparison. The trick will be to see if I can keep it that fast as the implementation gets more robust. It takes some shortcuts right now that don't scale well, but happen to be faster. > I really want Jeff to write a little book about it, walking the reader through the implementation. I would love that. I've skimmed femtolisp a few times and it's clean but suffers from the almost total lack of documentation that other programming language implementations also seem to have.
    - StefanKarpinski 13y ago
      I don't think that the standard Lua implementation is especially fast – it's the LuaJIT implementation that's so impressively fast. Programming language implementors do seem to be even less fond of writing comments than most programmers, don't they? I think one of the issues is that internals can change a lot fairly quickly and dealing with comments just makes that worse.

munificent 13y ago

I'm certainly impressed by those implementations, but I don't think I'm competing with them. :) I had JS (using node) in there for a while, but it was regularly 10x compared to the other languages. Using a JIT makes it effectively a different class of implementation. It's like entering a car in a bike race. Thanks for the benchmarks! I might steal some of those. They may be more arithmetic focused than I need (which makes sense for Julia, but less sense for an embedding scripting language where most math is probably done in the host app).

StefanKarpinski 13y ago
It was a turn of phrase, but really I just meant that in my experience it's healthy to have something to aspire to – that's why we always compare to fully optimized C and Fortran. It's easy to fall into an "interpreter bubble" and forget that there's a whole other realm of performance out there. And of course, interpreters can be quite fast – CPython is no slouch and Wren is giving it a run for its money, so kudos. Femtolisp [1] (which we use for Julia's parser) is a great example of a small and simple, yet fast and featureful interpreter. I really want Jeff to write a little book about it, walking the reader through the implementation. [1] https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp
- munificent 13y ago
  > I just meant that in my experience it's healthy to have something to aspire to I had actually thought that's what I was doing when I compared it to Lua! I was quite surprised at how well Wren did in comparison. The trick will be to see if I can keep it that fast as the implementation gets more robust. It takes some shortcuts right now that don't scale well, but happen to be faster. > I really want Jeff to write a little book about it, walking the reader through the implementation. I would love that. I've skimmed femtolisp a few times and it's clean but suffers from the almost total lack of documentation that other programming language implementations also seem to have.
  - StefanKarpinski 13y ago
    I don't think that the standard Lua implementation is especially fast – it's the LuaJIT implementation that's so impressively fast. Programming language implementors do seem to be even less fond of writing comments than most programmers, don't they? I think one of the issues is that internals can change a lot fairly quickly and dealing with comments just makes that worse.