Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Can a Programming Language Cause Engines to be Slow?

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 08:02:37 11/14/02

Go up one level in this thread


On November 13, 2002 at 14:59:56, David Rasmussen wrote:

I actually wrote a checkers program in Gofer (functional language
developed at university amsterdam).

In fact it was international 10x10 checkers for a 8x8 board. It
searched about 1 node a second at a P100.

That was not compiled. The gofer2c conversion tool they had was
very incompatible written for turbo-c, even by then completely outdated.

Yet i tried that once too and it was about a factor 20 faster than runtime.

I translated the code by hand to C and it was a factor 10000 faster.

Of course some gofer experts were not happy when i posted that publicly
around. They rewrote my code. After some weeks fulltime work they managed
to speedup my gofer code a factor 2.

Only left a factor 5000 :)

Of course this was without using imperative haskell additions. If you
are functional, then better write the whole thing functional, if not then
use an imperative language :)

Language *does* matter.

>On November 13, 2002 at 13:35:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>
>>(3) programming language features.  loops.  block if-then-else structures, good
>>access
>>to native hardware data units, etc.  Unfortunately, the more complex the
>>language, the
>>worse the optimizer, which is why C is quite popular.  Very simple programming
>>language,
>>fairly close to assembler-level stuff, makes it fast/efficient.  More abstract
>>languages (PL/1,
>>ADA, and off into the _really_ abstract stuff like prolog, snobol, lisp and so
>>forth) tend to
>>produce slower executables.
>>
>
>Ada is not more abstract than C, if you don't want it to. On the other hand, it
>is if you want it to.
>In fact it has way better support for near-hardware programming. You can
>specifiy more precisely and portably how many bits some field of a record is,
>and how it should be interpreted etc.
>
>/David



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.