Language Shootout

[Paul Winkler]

Roman Suzi wrote:
> One more point about shootout. If I understood correctly, advanced
> features are banned.

Not only that, but a number of the tests are explicitly testing how the
languages fare at doing a task "The Same Way". The site made a lot more sense to
me once I noticed that. For example,
http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/fibo/
doesn't just compute fibonacci numbers; the implementation must be *recursive*.
So this is really a test of how the languages fare at recursion. In python,
there's usually a more idiomatic way to solve a problem. In this case, if all
you really wanted was to compute fibonacci numbers, recursion is not the best
approach; performance degrades exponentially with the size of the series. Doing
it iteratively is much, much faster.

So basically what that benchmark tells me is: "Don't write recursively in Python
if performance is an issue".

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...................    paul winkler   ....................
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