[cap-talk] Dan Bernstein's qmail security lessons paper

[Ivan Krstić]

On Dec 16, 2007, at 10:38 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
> The choice in practice is between PHP, Perl, Java and
> C++.

And increasingly Python, which is the second most widely-used language  
at Google, for example.

> Lisp has no memory leaks, and substantially better
> performance than Java

This sentence doesn't mean anything. Lisp is a language with many  
different widely-used implementations; Java, while having multiple  
implementations, tends to be used almost exclusively to refer to Sun's  
reference implementation.

Certain Lisp implementations are quite fast at certain tasks. On the  
other hand, Java JIT compilers have been getting incredibly good at  
optimizing code, and can get uncomfortably close to C performance.

Here's Java 6, HotSpot JVM in server mode, going up against gcc,  
getting within 10% of C speed for some tasks:
<http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=gcc 
 >

Here's the same JVM doing better than Steel Bank Common Lisp on almost  
every test:
<http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=sbcl&lang2=java 
 >

Your mileage -- especially with commercial Lisps like Allegro -- may  
vary. But in general, beware of handwaving about performance. When not  
backed by hard data, it simply looks silly.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org