Are We Fast Yet? Comparing Language Implementations with Objects, Closures, and Arrays

[christian.humer at gmail.com]

Hi Stefan,

>>>  So, if you got a Truffle-based language, I’d be highly interested to 
>>>hear whether this could be useful for you.
>>  I think R would be a very nice addition, because the semantics / 
>>optimization challenges are so different to languages like Ruby and 
>>JavaScript.
>>  And it would help us a lot finding out were we currently stand with 
>>FastR compared to the other languages.
>
>R is an interesting challenge. While I use R for scripting reports and 
>papers, I never wrote this kind of code in it. So, I don’t really know 
>what a ‘proper’ R solution should look like. For instance for the more 
>numeric things like NBody or Mandelbrot, I am not sure the benchmark 
>style used really would be anywhere near ‘idiomatic’ R code. On top of 
>that comes that for R there doesn’t seem to be an agreement on a 
>specific object model. So, yet another dimension that would require 
>discussion before a port.
Do you see idiomatic R code as a requirement? I would rather do the 
benchmarks in the same style as the other languages to increase 
comparability even if that means some compromise in the R code. Why 
should R code in JavaScript style be less optimizable than others? We 
have other benchmarks that evaluate idiomatic R code, so we have this 
one covered. The problem is that they are hardly comparable to anything 
because the idiomatic use of the language is so different.

>
>So, I guess what I am saying is, I wouldn’t really know where and how 
>to start.
>But, if you have some agreement on those things, I sure could lend a 
>hand in porting the benchmarks :)
Sure, I can help.


Cheers,
Christian