Re: [Caml-list] speed

[Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr>]

> Is it normal that my ocaml program is only 2 times faster than the java 
> counterpart ?(using the same method and complied into native. jdk is 1.4.1

You know, many compiler researchers would kill their whole families to
get speedups by a factor of 2 :-)

James Gosling gave a talk at INRIA recently where he repeated the
party line that JDK 1.4 runs as fast, or even faster, than C++.
So, by transitivity, you're implying that OCaml is twice as fast as C++.
Yippee! 

More seriously: Java is nowhere as fast as a good C++ compiler (see
e.g. http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/almabench.html for an
independent, cross-language benchmark in numerical computing),
but it's not that slow either.  A factor of 2 slower than ocamlopt
sounds broadly reasonable, especially if the program doesn't stress
the GC too much.  Bagley's shootout (http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/)
seems to suggest a larger factor (JDK 1.3 slightly slower than OCaml
bytecode), but his figures may be lowered by Java's slow start-up times.

- Xavier Leroy
-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners