are-we-fast-yet VS jank

> Sure there's a small overhead to smart pointers

Not so small, and it has the potential to significantly speed down an application when not used wisely. Here are e.g. some measurements where the programmer used C++11 and did everything with smart pointers: https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/issues/80#issuecomm.... There was a speed down between factor 2 and 10 compared with the C++98 implementation. Also remember that smart pointers create memory leaks when used with circular references, and there is an additional memory allocation involved with each smart pointer.

> Garbage collection has an overhead too of course

The Boehm GC is surprisingly efficient. See e.g. these measurements: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcase.... The same benchmark suite as above is compared with different versions of Mono (using the generational GC) and the C code (using Boehm GC) generated with my Oberon compiler. The latter only is 20% slower than the native C++98 version, and still twice as fast as Mono 5.

See https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/blob/master/docs/guidelines.md.

That's a very interesting article, thanks. Interesting to note that Cython is only about twice as fast as Python 3.10 and only about 40% faster than Python 3.11.

The official Python site advertises a speedup of 25% from 3.10 to 3.11; in the article a speedup of 60% was measured. It therefore usually makes sense to measure different algorithms. Unfortunately there is no Python or C++ implementation yet for https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet.

> Software benchmarks are super subjective.

No, they are not, but they are just a measurement tool, not a source of absolute thruth. When I studied engineering at ETH we learned "Who measures measures rubbish!" ("Wer misst misst Mist!" in German). Every measurement has errors and being aware of these errors and coping with it is part of the engineering profession. The problem with programming language benchmarks is often that the goal is to win by all means; to compare as fairly and objectively as possible instead, there must be a set of suitable rules adhered to by all benchmark implementations. Such a set of rules is e.g. given for the Are-we-fast-yet suite (https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet).

I am aware of the various published test results where CoreCLR shows fantastic speed-ups compared to Mono, e.g. when calculating MD5 or SHA hash sums.

But my measurements based on the Are-we-fast-yet benchmark suite (see https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet and https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/tree/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet) show a completely different picture. Here the difference between Mono and CoreCLR (both versions 3 and 5) is within +/- 10%, so nothing earth shattering.

Here are my measurement results:

https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet/Are-we-fast-yet_results_linux.pdf comparing the same benchmark on the same machine run under LuaJIT, Mono, Node.js and Crystal.

https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet/Are-we-fast-yet_results_windows.pdf comparing Mono, .Net 4 and CoreCLR 3 and 5 on the same machine.

Here are the assemblies of the Are-we-fast-yet benchmark suite used for the measurements, in case you want to reproduce my results: http://software.rochus-keller.ch/Are-we-fast-yet_CLI_2021-08-28.zip.

I was very surprised by the results. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I measured on x86, or that the benchmark suite used includes somewhat larger (i.e. more representative) applications than just micro benchmarks.

What are your opinions? Do others have similar results?

There is a good reason for this; have a look at e.g. https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/blob/master/docs/guidelines.md.

Then apparently the SOM nbody program is taken as the basis of a new Java nbody program.

There's an effort afoot to bring this to the Clojure world, with the lovely name jank: https://jank-lang.org

I also liked that reference since I had not heard of Jank before. It is a work in progress so I just added a calendar entry for 9 months from now to check it out. https://jank-lang.org/

There will be a lot of room for this, once I build out more of the features. In particular, there will be a lot of Clojure libraries which need to gain jank support. Clojure doesn't require "porting", so to speak, since it has a special .cljc file which can use reader conditionals to check the host that it's in (clj, cljs, cljr, jank, etc). So anywhere those libs are using Java interop, we'd need to wrap it to use native interop instead.

On the compiler and tooling itself, I have some open issues here: https://github.com/jank-lang/jank/issues

The vast majority of it is heavy C++ work, though. Outside of that, the biggest gains will come from time spent on packaging, distribution, and testing on various platforms.

And if none of that sounds interesting or applicable, don't worry. Just be sure to join the Slack channel and hang out with us. :)

On the top of using C++ for scripting, and related to the discussion of CERN's ROOT/Cling, I am developing a Clojure dialect on C++/LLVM called jank: https://jank-lang.org/

jank is a true Clojure, meaning you get interactive, REPL-based development and a whole stdlib of persistent, immutable data structures and functions to transform them. But it's also C++, so you can write inline C++ within your jank source, and interpolate jank values within that. You can link with existing native code using LLVM and you can embed jank into your existing native projects to use for scripting.

jank is pre-alpha, right now, and I've only been showing it to Clojure devs so far, but there's a huge audience of C++ devs which may be interested in introducing Clojure to their native code.

jank (https://jank-lang.org/) is a Clojure dialect on LLVM with C++ interop. In this talk, Jeaye will cover jank's use cases, some challenges around building a native Clojure dialect, and some insights about Clojure itself found only by spelunking deep into the Clojure compiler.

I wonder if Jank [1] could be such a Lisp? I haven't played around with it, but I really like the idea and would love to see it get more traction.

[1]: https://jank-lang.org/

This isn't usable yet, but in active development by the author, and looks promising: https://jank-lang.org/

Jank looks pretty legit: https://jank-lang.org/