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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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jrockway·

By fast, you mean 70 times slower than other dynamic languages?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

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Nice cherry picking.

I can cherry pick: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

too: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

My favourite chart is still this one though: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

If that doesn't show how optimized Erlang is for certain use cases, nothing does.

Just saying that PHP is not objectively fast. "Fast enough", perhaps.

It's also worth noting that where PHP does well is in direct calls to C libraries; compare the C version and PHP version of pidigits; they are almost identical. A few languages do as well with their native numerical tower, which is very interesting.

> A few languages do as well...

Specifically?

Haskell: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=pid...

(I am pretty sure GHC uses GMP for its core math routines, though.)

> GHC uses GMP

Exactly, so I don't understand in what sense we could say GHC is an example of languages that "do as well with their native numerical tower"?

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ReplacingGMPNotes

It is GMP, but the programmer doesn't know that. It is simply a good implementation choice (for speed, anyway), which is what the benchmark measures.

CMUCL: http://www.cons.org/cmucl/

And few of the Ruby programs are re-written for quadcore so:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

And that PHP :: SBCL webpage has a link to "Overall Performance: PHP is rarely the bottleneck (HTML slides)" ;-)

If you work someplace where LISP and PHP are both contenders for the same numerically-intensive task, I agree you should use LISP.

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