That's a bit depressing: It used to be that if you ranked LOC as high on the scorecard and added a sprinkling of performance, the lisp compilers used to rank high or in first place- Now they're not even close... Anyone know what happened?

The other language implementations are forging ahead?

I don't think cmucl or sbcl have very good instruction schedulers (incresaingly important on modern machines), and their register allocators have needed work.

Newlisp doesn't look like much of a contender though, does it?

They used to be high up there because a bunch of us did the obvious o-p-timizations and broke good code to make sure the lisp code was as fragile as C and almost as fast. Under the new management, some of the benchmark code apparently no longer works. I am not entirely sure all are being run correctly either. I'll take a look when I have a large chunk of time again. Brent Fulgham is very receptive to feedback and code, so feel free guys. (There's an obvious algorithmic improvement to be tried for the moments/order statistics code in particular AFAIR.)

The "questionable"ness of the O word above is hilarious if intentional BTW. Made me laugh out loud, either way.

Don't worry, Lua's losing under the new management too.

The two main culprits appear to be:

1) The Lua core now lives in a shared library rather than the main program. While arguably Debianly-correct, it now eats all the PIC costs (unlike perl). In addition, newer versions of gcc need -fno-crossjumps to avoid pessimizing many bytecode interpreters. Perhaps this kind of issue is a good thing; it will encourage people to fix performance problems in the Debian implementations of their pet language.

2) The scoring system feels less intuitive now. There's a substantial penalty for missing tests, and the logarithmic scoring means that the relative ranking of two languages can be drastically affected by improvements in a third-party leader.

Also, I'm not sure that having squads of experts performing heroic optimi$ations on code in their pet language is helping us much in understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of languages. People on lua-l have been tweaking scripts in ways not intuitive to amateurs, and I'm dead certain other language fans have been as well.

Stuff like the hard-core optimi$ed C matrix math for Python isn't particularly revealing about the languages themselves so much as "how many extension libraries could you get into Debian." I've got ~100 lines of C code that fix Lua's string concat problem, and I could probably snipe matrix math in a weekend too, but so what.

"optimi$ed C matrix math for Python isn't particularly revealing about the languages"

Jay, make your opinion heard on the shootout mailing-list and/or send a message to the 'new management' from the webform.