• Baldur Nil@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Benchmarks should be like a scientific paper: they should describe all the choices made and why for the configurations. At least that will show if the people doing it really understand what they’re comparing.

    • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      7 months ago

      Have you ever read a paper? You can consider yourself lucky if they have error bars and repeated their measurements more than once. The quality of “benchmarking papers” is comically bad (on average).

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 months ago

      Yeah I have to second UnfortunateShort. Benchmarking papers are on average very bad, often because they’re trying to push a particular idea or product and are very biased, or because they’re like “my first benchmark” and done by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

      A classic one that gets referenced a lot is “Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages” I which the authors seriously benchmarked programs from the very heavily gamed Computer Language Benchmarks Game, and concluded among other things that JavaScript is much more energy efficient than Typescript.

      The only realistic way to benchmark different languages is to take implementations that weren’t written to be fast in a benchmark. For example Rosetta Code, or maybe leetcode.com solutions.

      Or to do it yourself. But that requires you to be experienced in many languages.

      Difficult for obvious reasons.