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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

comparing apples to apples is pointless, they are both apples.

and you can always compare “equivalent” algorithms as some languages may not be able to efficiently express the same algorithm as another. i know what you are after, but trying to have some benchmark that is “fair” according to some spec that is important to your needs will just be seen as pointless to others. benchmark game at least lets us see what the performance ceiling is of various languages, and anytime you object to a language having a worse implementation you may go fix it.

i think what anyone with a clue understands is that C C++ and Rust all have roughly equivalent performance ceilings. Nobody really thinks Rust is faster than C now.

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> Nobody really thinks Rust is faster than C now.

The submission title would beg to differ.

(I know, it explicitly calls out "benchmarks" as the context.)

I think languages like Rust or Swift have significant advantages around safety over C/C++, while not sacrificing much in terms of performance. But if one language's benchmark contributors are willing to put in more effort than another's to eke out additional performance, then you're going to see skewed results in favor of whichever has the more fervent evangelists or whichever language has more to prove.

If the goal is to compare performance of two languages which can express the same optimization in exactly the same way, and only one uses it, then the benchmarks fail in that respect.

go fix the c implementation then.

no single person can maintain optimally implemented solutions over dozens of languages. its up to we the people to help out. you want perfectly equivalent comparisons, make it happen

I don't want perfectly equivalent comparisons. I want people to stop citing this set of imperfect ones as if they mean anything.

Yeah. At a fundamental level these programs are running on the same hardware. Unless you’ve an ultra simplistic language (basic or logo), one could implement identical algorithms and methodologies and techniques and get the same performance.

I admit I'm destroying the metaphor here but there are a lot of useful comparisons to be made between different cultivars of apple and those comparisons have implications on their applications.

That's the whole point of the metaphor - comparing apples to apples is good, apples to oranges is bad.

I'm comparing apples to oranges every time I'm trying to decide which fruit to buy at the supermarket though.

and its a bad metaphor. there are many reasonable comparisons to be made between any two things even when both are not fruits

Technically speaking, there are limits and you cannot compare incomparable. You can find distinctions between two phenomena, a.k.a. inherent traits that make them different-by-definition from one another, but you cannot compare (liken, collate, contrast) them in any meaningful way. Like, what's the outcome of comparing "soft" with "warm"? And hence, comparing apples to apples are not pointless, quite contrary - they are comparable items and it makes total sense to compare them in the context of superiority by desirable value axes.

> Like, what's the outcome of comparing "soft" with "warm"?

You can have "soft" or you can have "warm" — which do you want?

You can have an apple or you can have an orange — which do you want?

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