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

[christian.humer at gmail.com]

As you wish. There is a nice R OO introduction [1]. The draft versions 
take a bit. I am myself not a very experienced R developer.


[1] http://adv-r.had.co.nz/OO-essentials.html

- Christian Humer




------ Original Message ------
From: "Stefan Marr" <java at stefan-marr.de>
To: christian.humer at gmail.com
Cc: "graal-dev at openjdk.java.net" <graal-dev at openjdk.java.net>
Sent: 07.01.2016 14:25:43
Subject: Re: Are We Fast Yet? Comparing Language Implementations with 
Objects, Closures, and Arrays

>Hi Christian:
>
>>  On 07 Jan 2016, at 14:08, christian.humer at gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>>  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?
>
>Hmm, I think it is really a question of what one wants. What do we want 
>the numbers to mean in the end? Should they have a predictive quality 
>for ’standard R code’? I think this in itself might be a difficult 
>question.
>
>[Note, I am not claiming that these benchmarks have a predictive 
>quality for the other languages either. I’d argue that optimizing this 
>‘core' language is a necessary condition for fast code, but, it is not 
>a sufficient one.]
>
>>  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.
>
>Ok, well, then I’d say, point me at an R OO tutorial of your liking.
>And, perhaps draft a version of the NBody [1] and Towers [2] 
>benchmarks, so that I got a code style I could work from. (I linked the 
>JavaScript versions as examples because they are self-contained, but 
>the other languages are valid templates as well.)
>
>Best regards
>Stefan
>
>
>[1] 
>https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/blob/master/benchmarks/JavaScript/nbody.js
>[2] 
>https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/blob/master/benchmarks/JavaScript/towers.js