are-we-fast-yet VS Lua

> 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.

The EventSource uses the Lua language to search for any services with ports set to 80 or 443 in the ‘argocd’ namespace. More examples can be found here.

If you're new to the 12 in 24 series, I'm learning and building projects with a new programming language every month - this month, it's the Lua scripting language. You can find source code for the projects I build in the official GitHub repository (check it out, this week's folder contains code for both this and two other bonus projects!).

This month, we're talking about Lua. It's not always a first choice when it comes to programming, but I think there's a lot to enjoy about this little language. Heck, I'm a big game development fan myself - I would look into it even if that was the only reason to.

It’s Portuguese. It’s the same in the Lua codebase [1].

[1]: https://github.com/lua/lua

If we think we need more flexibility for processing records, we can write our own embedded filters using Lua language. Lua is a highly efficient programming language used mainly for embedded scripting.

Lua

➜ ~ brew info lua ==> lua: stable 5.4.6 (bottled) Powerful, lightweight programming language https://www.lua.org/ /opt/homebrew/Cellar/lua/5.4.6 (29 files, 788.7KB) * Poured from bottle using the formulae.brew.sh API on 2023-05-16 at 11:03:06 From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/l/lua.rb License: MIT ==> Caveats You may also want luarocks: brew install luarocks ==> Analytics install: 16,599 (30 days), 56,745 (90 days), 139,027 (365 days) install-on-request: 1,763 (30 days), 6,266 (90 days), 21,105 (365 days) build-error: 0 (30 days)

I think Lua is a good example of doing documentation well. The source code is commented only as much as needed, mainly with brief comments about things that might not be obvious and a small number of longer explanations of how the architecture works (mainly relevant to developers). It also has a super nice feature that's surprisingly rare: each file has a very short line at the top that describes what the file is, so you don't have to guess based on the filename alone. The API is documented in a single HTML file on the website that has both the high level descriptions of the language and architecture, as well as documentation for each public-facing function. The docs are maintained by hand, but the API is mostly stable, so the docs don't need to change very often.

This is using the Lua language and the Solar2d game framework