Scala 2.9 vs 2.10 Performance

http://markehammons.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/2-10-performance/

by bertzzie • 14 years ago

68 20 14 years ago

markehammons.wordpress.com

tikhonj• 14 years ago

This isn't the most compelling of benchmarks. It's still infinitely better than what most people do--the author actually measured something in a reasonable way!--but I don't think it's enough to make any interesting conclusions. I suppose it shows that there is a performance boost, which is great, but I'd really like to know where the gains really are.

Could somebody familiar with the changes to 2.10 explain where the performance boost came from and what code it will affect? Does this make Scala a more compelling choice for the discerning functional programmer?

gtani• 14 years ago

It's incomplete reporting without the JRE heap, inlining, GC and other options used and some kind of residency and median memory usage data. Also, warmups, hardware and OS (Windows seems to frequently produce interesting results. (I haven't seen a GC testbench for java like dons' gc-tune pkg for haskell, but that would be a great tool

jaytaylor• 14 years ago

Performance improvements are nice and all, but I'm already generally satisfied with the performance of Scala 2.8.x and 2.9.x.

What I'd really like to see is faster compile times. I know it's a tall order given the complexity of implicits, but compared to other languages Scala compilation slowness can be a tough sell.

eropple6• 14 years ago

Performance improvements are really important given the rise of poor JVMs like Dalvik, though. Scala is really painful on Dalvik due to the amount of garbage it generates.

seanmcdirmid2• 14 years ago

I wouldn't call Dalvik a poor JVM, just a JVM optimized for a certain mobile application mix (not so GC intensive) that Scala doesn't really support yet.

laureny3• 14 years ago

> Scala is really painful on Dalvik due to the amount of garbage it generates.

That seems to be a Scala problem, not a Dalvik one.

Dalvik is a JVM that's extremely optimized for one specific purpose: running on mobile phones. And it's doing a fantastic job at that.

_delirium• 14 years ago

True, although it's not entirely clear from this Scala-on-JVM benchmark whether there'd be a comparable speedup for Scala-on-Dalvik. Depends on the reasons for the speedup I assume.

jorgeortiz85• 14 years ago

The Scala compiler itself is written in Scala, so improvements in performance will also benefit compile times. Or so I hope.

habosa• 14 years ago

How is this managed? Is there a "backup compiler" written in some other language to compile the compiler?

alexjarvis• 14 years ago

Nice post, I just used your benchmark to also compare running Scala in JDK 6 and 7 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4862035

Scala 2.9 vs 2.10 Performance

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