[Mono-list] lies and microbenmarks (Was: Mono 0.23 windows installer)

[Fergus Henderson]

On 13-Mar-2003, David Jeske <jeske@chat.net> wrote:
> I can see how the anti-benchmarking clause was important to the MS
> lawyers, because if an article was published showing a brand new .NET
> runtime slower than the 5 year old JVM technology, readers would not
> respect the newness of .NET. In reality, the legal people should have
> talked to the technical people and realized that nearly all MS.NET
> vs. Java benchmarks ALREADY come out with .NET on top

All the benchmarks you've seen, you mean?
Don't you think it is possible that the benchmark results that
you have seen are skewed, because of the .NET license condition?

Also, Java is not the only competition.  In performance comparisons with
native code, .NET is going to come off worse.  The question is how much
worse.  Furthermore, the answer may be different for different
programming styles or different programming languages.

One of .NET's big selling points is that it supports multiple programming
languages.  However, if you get a 1000-times slow down for non-C#-like
languages, that claim is a bit of a sham, isn't it?  It's all very well
to say that you can use other languages, but if the performance of .NET
for those other languages is prohibitively bad, people will prefer to
compile those other languages to native code.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.