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Comment: Re:They're not equal though... (Score 1) 338

by _|()|\| (#37607358) Attached to: OCaml For the Masses

most of us do no not think in a way that maps easily to functional programming.

I'm kind of surprised that virtually all of the comments so far focus on concision and functional programming. To me, the overriding theme of the article is that static typing is good, and that type inference makes it less annoying.

Sure, it's a debate older than Emacs vs. vi, but this is Slashdot. Although Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and others have swung the pendulum towards dynamic typing, I'm really sympathetic to static typing. Unfortunately, Java makes a less than compelling case without type inference. I gather that C# and Go provide it to some extent.

Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code makes a pretty good argument for catching as many mistakes as possible in the compiler, and making liberal use of asserts to verify preconditions. Most of my time is spent with dynamically typed languages, and I'm increasingly frustrated by bugs that could have been caught by a compiler in another language.

Comment: Re:This is one of the worse bench compil ever (Score 2) 272

by _|()|\| (#37587358) Attached to: Tom's Hardware Pits Newest Firefox, Opera and Chrome Against Each Other

Light memory usage (1 tab):
firefox: 438MB
chrome: 134MB

memory management (after closing 40 tabs):
* firefox: 438MB immediately after, 161MB five minutes later
* chrome: 134MB immediately after, 94MB five minutes later

You're misinterpreting the "memory management" chart, because of the poorly worded lead in.

The actual "light load" numbers from the first chart (one tab) are Firefox 43.2 MB, Chrome 72.5 MB. Slight edge to Firefox.

The "heavy load" numbers from the second chart (forty tabs) are Firefox 475.3 MB, Chrome 1,057.2 MB. Big (and, frankly, surprising) win for Firefox.

The "memory management" numbers in the third chart show memory usage after closing thirty-nine of the forty tabs. This looks like a big win for Chrome. I don't know why Adam wrote, "We combined the two memory management tests into a single chart," or why he declared Firefox the winner of this test.

Memory usage has long been my biggest disappointment with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome (in that order). Safari may win the occasional benchmark sprint, but it eventually slows to a crawl, dragging my system down with it. Firefox is pretty much the same, but less so. Too soon to tell how Firefox 7 is faring. (Maybe the real point of rapid releases is to force you to restart the browser periodically.) Chrome is better about releasing memory, but it just seems to fall apart with too many tabs: too high a water mark and lots of spurious redraws (a nuisance that Safari 5.1 has also acquired).

JavaScript has made huge strides due to renewed competition. Hopefully memory usage will too.


by Hemos (#37210276) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot



