The importance of innovation

Overview

In a recent article I wrote about how you do things can make a big difference. Java can be significantly faster than C

The aim was to show how you can use the same algorithm (the what), implemented with a different approach (the how) and make significant improvement in performance.

What I have learnt

I now understand that the purpose of the web site is compare languages and remove the developer from the equation by making "the how" as similar to what has been written before as possible. I see this is legitimate approach to have a fair comparison of languages.

The Importance of Innovation

To me it shows you what can happen when you deliberately limit innovation, even if you have good reasons to do so. If you prescribe one way of implementing a requirement, it can make a big difference to the solution you can achieve.

In the case of this benchmark, following the requirements as closely as I could, but admittedly disregarding how these requirements had been achieved before resulted in a solution which was 2.2x faster than the previous C solutions and 4.6x faster than the previous Java solution.


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