Python tests used to compare different OSes

http://william-os4y.livejournal.com/8436.html

by l0nwlf • 15 years ago

12 6 15 years ago

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neo7• 15 years ago

python is a platform independent language. What tests does this run?

kunley• 15 years ago

Python's own regression tests. They are in its source distro.

bediger• 15 years ago

Very interesting, but these OSes are actually just 2 branches of the "unix" tree of OSes. Too bad he didn't include Windows, or OpenVMS, very different operating systems.

The only experiment using Windows NT vs NetBSD that I'm aware of is this: "The Measured Performance of Personal Computer Operating Systems" (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/papers/sosp95/). On the same hardware, for cross-platform tasks, NetBSD outperformed Windows NT. This was in 1995, so it was probably Windows NT 3.51 and NetBSD 1.0 or 1.1

kstenerud• 15 years ago

Great. Wonderful.

So what does it mean to "win" the test? What do any of those numbers even mean?

wipt• 15 years ago

This is a very poor way to compare operating systems. Each has different optimizations by default. That, and many many other factors make this a terrible project. It's unfortunate that so much work was put into testing so few things when many more things need to be considered. The set of data (machine variations, software tuning, etc) are far too small. It doesn't matter how many times one runs the same test on one machine if it's not the machine he's really testing, but the operating system.

Now if it was only a matter of what operating system without tuning works best on this one machine without tuning, then this might just legitimate.

vytis• 15 years ago

Doesn't it test a Python implementation on different OS rather than the OS itself?

Python tests used to compare different OSes

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