Aggregated interesting things

Lisp benchmarking

Well, it's been a good evening for interesting things! Lisp has been benchmarked by some newsgroupers on almabench. Interestingly, the two implementations they came up with (on SBCL and CMUCL) bettered the C++ implementation by a few percent. The important fact, of course, was the style of code and the consequences for programmers:

So what have we learned? We confirmed what we pretty much knew: you can write a C program in CL, at which point the relative speed of your C and CL versions will depend on the relative quality of the code generation.

Furthermore:

This didn't show any of the benefits of CL wrt C++, but it does show some of the benefits wrt languages like Squeak Smalltalk or Python. Sure, it's possible to call out to C or C++ or Fortran, but if you have working Lisp code, and you know how to micro-optimize for your implementation, you can spend an hour or so (how long did Duane say he spent on it?) and get C-ish performance. And still have portable CL, and all the safety benefits thereof.

In essence: you can write good, clean, abstract Lisp with slightly less performance than C, and move towards C's performance as required. Over C/C++, then, Lisp has abstraction; over Python and Ruby it has the possibility of performance. Quite a good combination.

Capitalisation and the Semantic Web/semantic web, and Ruby

Rich Kilmer (looks like an interesting chap: he has blog sections for Flash, OS X, Ruby, Semantic Web, and poems!) gives a good point of view: don't judge the Semantic Web, just try using the technologies. This, I think, is they key difference between the Semantic Web and the semantic web: a grand vision versus gradual emergence. Kilmer also discusses using Xcode to edit Ruby files — apparently it does Ruby syntax highlighting, which is cool!

PocketPC RSS aggregation

For those of you with PocketPCs, you may be interested by this RSS reader that synchronises through ActiveSync. Also very cool.

FOAF and trust

Anyone with a FOAF file should really build a trust network. I like to keep my eye on MINDSWAP; professional interest, y'know!

Syndication racing

I'm approaching 100 syndications in NetNewsWire, and I suppose it's actually more because of the PubSub and other aggregations I follow. Dangerously time consuming, this habit.

Cory and multi-tools

Cory Doctorow likes Gerbers. Hmmm.

At this point, I think I should stop writing.

Posted at 2004-03-09 10:00:36 by Richard • Link to Aggregated interes…
Comments, trackbacks.