Re: [Caml-list] Re: Is OCaml fast?

[Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr>]

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On 11/25/2010 11:12 PM, Jon Harrop wrote:
> Stefan wrote:
>> I think OCaml's problem with this benchmark do point at a weakness of the current
>> GC code.

What makes you think that ?

I have contributed to some of the solutions that you can find there (and 
some other ones were rejected because caching results is not allowed too 
;-) ), and the GC was _NEVER_ a problem !

  (except for binary-trees, but for absurd reasons)

  The main problem was that other languages have bigger standard 
libraries, whereas OCaml has a very small one (just what is needed to 
compile the compiler, actually). In many problems, you could benefit 
from using a very simple shared-memory library (in mandelbrot, the ocaml 
multicore solution has to copy the image in a socket between processes, 
whereas it could just be in a shared memory segment), and in general, 
many solutions could benefit from specialised data structures that are 
provided in other languages by their standard libraries, and from some 
system calls that are currently not in the Unix library.

Anyway, I decided to stop trying to improve the solutions, and work on 
improving the compiler and its libraries instead. It might benefit to 
ocaml ranking in the shootout, but more importantely, it will benefit to 
everybody in the community also.

--Fabrice

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