On Aug 11, 2009, at 5:14 PM, fft1976 wrote: > On Aug 11, 1:50 pm, Stuart Sierra <the.stuart.sie...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I agree wholeheartedly. Let's optimize wherever possible, but drop >> on >> the side-by-side comparisons. > > I think it's very immature to dictate to others what should be > important to them. Speed may be of minor concern to some Ruby-on-Rails > types, but it is important to me, and if the documentation of Clojure, > its author himself and many of the fans say that it should be exactly > as fast as Java, when doing the same thing, I think it's valid to > wonder why it doesn't happen in reality.
Let's try to take a little of the hyperbole out of things. No one has tried to dictate anything to anyone. Performance is important to you? It's important to me, too, and I'm hungry to get more speed out of clojure than I do already (being locked in to v1.0 through the end of the week). But I know that performance is highly application-dependent; for one other data point, our partial reimplementation of a very well-tested and highly-optimized 5-year-old Java codebase that is completely CPU-bound has resulted in roughly equivalent performance (quite literally, less than 10% on either side depending on input data). I can't wait to take advantage of newnew, transients, etc. Your application domain may expose some rough edges that could be improved, in which case whatever you can do to help will surely be welcomed by *everyone*. That said, I don't think I've ever heard Rich Hickey, or anyone else for that matter, say that clojure would ever be "exactly as fast as Java" in every domain. Such a claim would be somewhat absurd to make, especially when other jvm languages that have far more in common with Java and that have been around for far longer (here I'm thinking of Scala) haven't yet risen to that level across the board. I know I've heard Rich say things like "clojure can be as fast as Java", or in the case of certain numeric benchmarks (which is always an exercise in cherry-picking), it can be exactly as fast. But in the end, performance is a land full of shades of gray, and benchmarks generally don't do that landscape's complexity the justice it deserves. If your domain is one where clojure doesn't meet your standards, I hope you'll recognize the language's potential, and do whatever you can to help -- but please don't assume that everyone else in the community shares your specific priorities. Those who know the deep innards of the clojure compiler and data structures are hardly standing still, but it's a big sandbox these days, and there's a lot of different concerns. Cheers, - Chas --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
