Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
5 points by lojic 6102 days ago | link | parent

Welcome to the Arc forum.

It's premature to say what type of performance Arc will eventually provide, but I'm not aware of anything in the language that would preclude good performance - it will depend on the implementation of the production compiler.

Is there a particular aspect of Arc that causes you concern with respect to performance? Also, do you have a particular application in mind, or is you concern a hypothetical one?



2 points by pgwoden 6101 days ago | link

Thanks. It's not the language itself that I'm concerned about. Rather, I'm wondering how much interest there will ever be in developing a truly fast Arc.

Consider Python, for example. It's been around for a while and is widely used. Yet it's still pretty slow. Fast enough for building websites, sure, but it's nothing like C or Fortran for serious numerical work.

Python's supporters will tell you that its slowness doesn't matter, because you can re-write the time-consuming bits of your code in C. I can imagine that that works well for web programming where latency accounts for much of the execution time anyway and one might only occasionally have a really chunky calculation to do. But in my experience doing Monte Carlo simulations, solving large systems of non-linear equations and that type of thing, a large part of the code is fairly critical for execution speed, so re-writing in C would mean doing a large part of the project in C. If I wanted to do that, I'd just write in C to begin with.

-----

1 point by lojic 6100 days ago | link

What programming language do you currently use for your numerical work?

-----

1 point by pgwoden 6100 days ago | link

I've experimented with Ruby and Python lately, with the hard-care numerics to be written in C, as I alluded to above. I've not actually done huge amounts of programming recently, although in the past I did so in a proprietary language resembling C and in Fortran. Recently I have a look at CL (which accounts for my interest in Arc) and at OCaml, though I've not yet used either extensively.

-----