Re: [Vala] Fwd: Why is Vala 10 times slower than C ?

[Alexandre Rosenfeld <alexandre rosenfeld gmail com>]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 10:03, Serge Hulne <serge hulne gmail com> wrote:

> Actually, what I do not grasp is the following:
>
> - Vala is allegedly just a thin object-oriented layer on top of C (glib2).
>
> -  One might therefore expect a runtime performance which is closer to
> say C or C++, than to the (slower) performance of a high-level
> language (like , e.g.Python).
>
> - However, it turns out that, surprisingly Vala is not only slower
> than C and C++ but even slower than Python.
>
> This is the part that I do not understand !

It isn't slower, your benchmark is just not comparing what you want to
compare. The raw speed of Vala is equivalent to the raw speed of C, there is
no reason for it to be otherwise. Check these benchmarks:
http://code.google.com/p/vala-benchmarks/wiki/BenchResults
What we are saying is that if you want to compare the raw speed of C, then
compare to the raw speed of Vala and not the speed of the GLib type
initialization with the overhead that using objects will have. A benchmark
never compares the maintability of the code or the other thousand things
that are important in a language.

*Alexandre Rosenfeld*


> Serge.