[Wellington-pm] Perl 5 faster than C

[Sam Vilain]

Douglas Bagnall wrote:

>... with Memoize
>
>Just to pick up on something else Grant mentioned last night.
>
>  
>

Hey,

According to http://www.xgc.com/benchmarks/benchmarks.htm,

The Ackermann benchmark program focuses on function calls. Using a
clever yet simple formula, the Ackermann benchmark is able to execute
millions of non-redundant calls, while using a modest amount of stack
space. We always time a call of 'ackermann (3,6)'. Years ago this would
execute in a time we could measure with a stopwatch. Modern computers
are much faster, and in most cases the time will be much less than one
second. For comparison, a VAX 780 (circa 1980) programmed in VAX Pascal,
scores 6 seconds. The source is here
<http://www.xgc.com/benchmarks/ackermann_c.htm>.

If Memoize helps that much, I guess the "non-redundant calls" bit is
inaccurate...

Of course the parrot implementation does not 'cheat' in this way :-).
Those are real function calls.

Sam.