M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Lloyd Linklater wrote:
>> 
>> I was working at Quantum at the time (hard disk maker) and this very 
>> controversy arose.  The managers listened to the philosophical debate 
>> for a while and decided to settle it.  We had volunteers from each side 
>> to write code in their idiom doing theoretical and practical tests of 
>> speed.  By theoretical I mean do <this thing> X times and see how fast 
>> it is.  By practical, I mean that you had to see how many seeks, 
>> read/writes, etc you could get in a certain time with the different 
>> algorithms.
>> 
>> The pure language, no assembler, won hands down.
> 
> I'm really curious about two things:
> 
> 1. The processor architecture, and
> 2. The language.

1.  It was on a 386, 16MHz with no math coprocessor.  (How is THAT for 
old???)

2.  We were using straight C and Microsoft's 5.1 compiler on DOS 3.1 if 
memory serves.

Note:  I was the one that did the theoretical programming.  My buddy did 
the practical and he did it with a kind of a cheat.  He would write 
code, then look at the assembler that the compiler produced.  He would 
tweak the code and look again.  Whatever produced the least number of 
assembler lines is what he used.  His code was more than an order of 
magnitude faster.

Theoretical speed is somewhat like the velocity metrics on high 
performance cars.  Just because it goes 0-60 in 4 seconds does not mean 
that you can get it to do that.  It is much the same with java vs. Ruby. 
Many articles I have read, and with which I agree, say that development 
and maintenance are the biggest costs for most projects.  Getting things 
up and earning revenue as fast as possible is not to be underestimated.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.