Re: SBCL is now faster than Java, as fast as Ocaml, and getting better

jayessay wrote:
Kenny <kentilton@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Jon Harrop wrote:
Arian is irrelevant.
Perhaps.

<<discussion mostly nailing what happened as per official post mortem review>>

A couple other things worth mentioning:


mind, but should we failover anyway? Of course not. But the
determination that overflow would mean hardware failure might have
been because they knew the largest reasonable value was 5000, so
anything like 30k is just nuts.

This is exactly right. That's how real world engineering works - the
limits have to do with what is actually happening, not some artificial
cpu limit (unless the cpu itself is the object of study - which in A4
it did play a bit part in this).


Otoh, management /might/ have paid for a review of those extreme
assertions, if in fact it was a much smaller task than reviewing all
the arithmetic in the system. But if they added assertions around all
the arithmetic....

Just to make Harrop apoplectic: They also would have caught this early
on if management had paid to have the _testing_ done as well (and per
engineering requests).

And if we want to leave Harrop crying after the fit passes we point out that had they used Lisp they would have worked so much faster and built such better software that testing would have been well affordable. Indeed, a code walker would have helped catalog the various hotspots such as divisions that might be fed zero denominators, so the code review would cost less even as more money was available for it.

Jon's answer will begin "But with pattern matching...."

Over here I was hunting between two quick fixes since the usual Quality Comes First(tm) sign got taken down and replaced with "No more bananas until we ship" when I realized, awfukkit, it will be easier to Do It Right? Pencil in a month delay? Nah, three days at the end of which Something Wonderful Happened, there was a loud snap and when i investigated a bit of the application that had gotten quietly bent out of shape by the stresses forced on it by the prior ugly solution had snapped back into its proper spacetime shape all by itself.

That doesn't happen with F#.

Watch for a blog entry entitled "There's a Reason Imelda Marcos Had 2000 Pairs of Shoes, Jeff" for more on how agile languages encourage better programs, not better programmers.

kt
.