November 5, 2007...8:30 pm

Wide Finder: Analysis?

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Tim Bray’s response to the suggestion of analysis for the Wide Finder Results is “Are you kidding me!?!? Getouttahere. Maybe someday.”

I’m only barely braver.

People hours are more expensive than computer hours. Tim includes the lines of code metric, and the average elapsed wall-clock for each implementation. Let’s use division!

Name Language Elapsed LoC LoC per Elapsed Model
clv5 Gawk 46.73 24 0.51 Serial
wf_p Ruby 50.16 39 0.78 Map-Reduce
wf-2 Python 41.04 38 0.93 Map-Reduce
wf-Heikkinen OCaml 49.69 110 2.21 Serial
wf-Fernandez OCaml 39.17 124 3.17 Serial
tbray5 Erlang 20.74 76 3.66 Message Passing
tbray9(128) Erlang 21.58 119 5.51 Message Passing
wf-block OCaml 18.99 144 7.58 Serial
wf-6(2) Python 16.91 137 8.1 Scatter-Gather

Let’s assume less lines of code = easier to understand. Let’s also assume that parallel processing concepts are hard to learn.

Then it seems Map-Reduce models are maturing well. Thank Google for popularizing that.

Odd, though. Erlang’s model of message passing is older. But, I hear there are weaknesses in its standard library?

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