[fpc-pascal] FPC now 3rd in shootout

[Florian Klaempfl]

L schrieb:
>>>> There has been a long discussion on the Shootout forums about it. Isaac
>>>> believes that it is more fair this way for languages that don't have all
>>>> benchmarks implemented. Now we simply have to make him retract all our
>>>> poor performing programs :)
>>> Exactly.  A not very fast language can win the shootout
>>> if it is faster than every other language for just one benchmark
>>> and if only the program for that benchmark is submitted.
>>>
> 
> People will ignore the ones with just a single test anyway..
> 
> When I look at them, for example, I ignore the ones with only two or three
> tests.
> 
> I think they understand that some people have common sense enough not to count
> the ones with only 1 or 2 completed tests.
> 
> Instead of penalizing the ones with 1 or 2 tests, they should simply make it
> mandatory for the language to at least complete X amount of tests (i.e. 5 or 10
> or however many).
> 
> The funny thing I see is everyone recommending Pchars. Why not
> setlength/uniquestring? Still too slow? Several years/months ago, when I posted
> something on the mailing lists about how trying to defeat the compiler with
> reference counting basically leads to more work than just taking matters into
> your own hands with pchars.. it led to some heated arguments.  For example
> some said that the compiler didn't need to use pchars and it was fast.. hmm
> I wonder if maybe there are some reference counting slowdowns in the 
> compiler that slow it down a bit. Although I realize it uses shortstrings
> for a lot of stuff.

For the really speed critical stuff FPC indeed uses shortstrings. Well
written ansistring code reaches maybe 95% percent of the performance of
pchar based code with the big disadvantage that pchar usage is very
error prone and unproductive, see all those buffer overflows in c
programs. However, for a benchmark this doesn't count. For a benchmark
even the 5% advantage of pchar usage count.