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by kick 2003 days ago
He wrote solutions for Shootout (predecessor to that Debian page) problems a few years ago; a lack of k in benchmarks is not due to a lack of k being volunteered: http://www.kparc.com/z/comp.k

k is really fast. Half of the things on the Shakti mailing list are just Arthur getting really excited about how significantly he's beating x or y or z in performance and giving numbers for it. `grep`ping it now I see 40 in half a year that explicitly contain the word "benchmark," though not all of these are comparing to other things (some are just comparing to different k releases), and there are more comparisons without that word.

Arthur doesn't work at Kx anymore, by the way. He's at Shakti now. Shakti has a different (but still draconian/non-(A)GPL) license. It probably doesn't have the benchmark clause, but I don't care enough to check (I prefer J to k and don't have a proprietary k on my system).

4 comments

> He wrote solutions for Shootout (predecessor to that Debian page) problems a few years ago; a lack of k in benchmarks is not due to a lack of k being volunteered

That's 6 of the programs, there were at-least 4 others ;-)

I lacked and still lack the knowledge to figure out if those snippets are doing what they should.

For example, do those scripts set arg n from the command line and read from stdin? Do those scripts write correctly formatted output to stdout?

What a pity that page does not show measurements for those scripts, and a comparison with some of the C programs written for the benchmarks game.

Thanks for that link. Do you know if the results are posted anywhere?

https://shakti.com/license.php says "Customer shall not... distribute ... any report regarding the performance of the Software benchmarks..." which I would need to agree to if I want to download the binaries at https://shakti.sh/benchmark/

You could check and see if it was ever posted on the Shootout site with archive.org, but when I checked coverage was spotty. The point of these benchmarks is everyone being able to run them themselves, though.
> was ever posted

No, K was never installed.

> The point of these benchmarks is everyone being able to run them themselves, though.

Exactly.

And compare with programs in some other language:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Have you looked at any of the opensource k impls? (Kona, ok, klong, ngn/k...)
If you look at my post history, it's actually primarily free software APL implementations! ngn/k is amazing. John Earnest's work with his own variants is really fantastic. I dislike klong and Kona.
How has your experience been with J for on disk time series DBs.
Not developer, just a lone data wrangler but FWIW Jd has made me much faster at exploring data. I now use Jd to create my datasets and use R just for the models. IMO, it's far better than using R to tidy things.