Re: [q-lang-users] Pure

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi everybody, and sorry for the latency...

Libor Spacek wrote:
> It is great to hear about your progress!

I have some more news. The Pure project was just approved by the sf.net
staff, so I can now set up a website and source code repository. After
finding and fixing a few more bugs in the compiler today I should be
ready for an initial release tomorrow.

For your bookmarks:
The project page: http://sf.net/projects/pure-lang/
The website will be here once it goes live: http://pure-lang.sf.net/

> I suspect the answer to beating even more languages lies in making your 
> matcher as fast as possible, so that it can approach the speed of a fixed
> function call that most other languages use.

I doubt it. The pattern-matching code is already as good as I can make
it, I challenge you to do any better! ;-) (In fact, the compiler *will*
already compile a call to a definition like foo x = ...; to just a
simple function call.)

AFAICS, if one really wants to get C-like performance, then you have to
avoid boxed values at all costs. Which pretty much means static strong
typing. If you don't believe me, have a look at the recursive benchmark:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=recursive&lang=all

(Well, there's a Lisp at an astonishing performance factor of 3.1 there,
but if you take a look at the benchmark code then you'll find that it's
riddled with type annotations.)

Pure is currently around factor 34 (measured against the C benchmark,
with gcc 4.1, -O3 on AMD), and actually I'm quite happy with that. After
all there's more interesting stuff to program than Ackerman and
Fibonacci functions. ;-)

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag