Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
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From: conway@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Thomas Charles CONWAY)
Subject: Re: Prolog benchmarking... how ?
Message-ID: <9425908.800@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
References: <34qvro$6f3@tribune.usask.ca> <PEREIRA.94Sep10191603@alta.research.att.com> <ryoung.55.0009E235@utdallas.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 22:46:56 GMT
Lines: 32

ryoung@utdallas.edu (Young U. Ryu) writes:

>In article <PEREIRA.94Sep10191603@alta.research.att.com> pereira@alta.research.att.com (Fernando Pereira) writes:
>
>[Fernando Pereira talked about "bench_mark" contributed by many
> well-known People.]
>
>It would be great to put this in FAQ ...
>
>Also, it would be great to put the benchmark results of
>Prolog interpreters and compilers (either freeware or commercial).
>If possible, I can volunteer...
>

Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily mean much to look at the
benchmarks of language implementations carried out on any machine
but your own. Here at Melbourne Uni, we have been benchmarking
our new compiler for a pure logic language, and we get some very
weird anomolies between machines. The causes of these strange
behaviours (such as things getting slower when we use machine
registers for storage instead of global variables) are probably
due to caching effects, and possibly in some cases pipelining and
super-scalarity effects. The only way to see which language
implementation is going to run your program the fastest is to
port it to all the contenders, and try it.

Benchmarking is just one of those things..... 

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Conway                                           conway@cs.mu.oz.au
AD DEUM ET VINUM
