Subject: [Fwd: Java versus Lisp. Comparison needed.]
From: Stavros Macrakis
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:40:59 -0400
> Subject: Java versus Lisp. Comparison needed.
> ...The Java program turns out to be much slower than the Lisp
> program. I was expecting it to be faster. To be precise, SBCL was 26
> times faster than Java (SBCL: 16 minutes; Java: 7 hours). ... I wonder
> why her results were so different from the Computer
> Language Benchmarks Game, and from what I have read in the literature.
> I suppose that people who wrote the Java program made a very stupid
> blunder.
What is the relationship of the Java program to the Lisp program? Was
one of them translated into the other by hand? automatically? Is the
Java code a Lisp interpreter which runs the Lisp code :-) ? Were they
written independently from the same spec? Were they written to
different specs? Who wrote them?
I strongly suspect that the timing difference between the SBCL and the
Java versions has very little to do with the quality of the
implementations and much to do with characteristics of the source
programs, so speculating about the relative qualities of the garbage
collectors etc. is premature.
-s