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by jrockway 5055 days ago
Yes. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...

Note that Java compares very favorably with C. (Of course, the real thing to take away from that chart is: why don't all the JVM users switch to Haskell? It's more concise, safer, and has a better community.)

3 comments

Many JVM developers for whom programming is craft rather than a day job are definitely looking at both Scala and Haskell. Lots of excellent stuff going on with both, as you point out - concise, safer.
I'll just have to trust you on that I suppose.
That is true. As someone who thinks both ways (craft and day job) the issue with Scala (that with which I have the most experience) is the tooling.
The JVM can be bootstrapped relatively easily compared to Haskell. It's just C++ code. If I gave you a computer with a C and C++ compilers, and the ghc source, what would you do?
I'd make a snide comment about receiving a phone call from 1980 asking for their computer back.
Now that benchmark you linked has a hidden bias towards Java. If you read the methodology listed in their FAQ, they mention they ran each benchmark for Java 66 times in the same JVM instance before discarding the first 65 results, which leaves out the initial iterations before JIT has kicked in. For servers, which perform many similar operations for each client and are rarely restarted, the benchmark you posted is probably valid. But for jobs that wouldn't benefit from JIT, Java would perform much more slowly.
NOT TRUE.

If you read the methodology listed in their FAQ, they state in bold - "Time measurements include program startup time".

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#time

If you read the section "What about Java?" they mention ADDITIONAL measurements, which are only shown on the Help page, and indicate how little difference JVM startup time makes once these programs have run for 5 seconds and 20 seconds.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#java