Strangelights

When I saw that IronRuby had been released I thought I’d put it through its paces seeing how the language preformed with respect to IronPython and of course F#. Perhaps a little unfair for a number of reasons, firstly this is a pre-alpha release so one can’t really expect much, we need to give it time to mature and two, ruby generally performs slow than python in the “Computer Language Bench Mark Game”,  (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/) so one wouldn’t really except IronRuby to outperform either IronPython or F#. However I thought what the heck and downloaded the source for the ruby bench marks.

I’ve just notice that the “MSDN Community Distribution June Release” has a video presentation about F#.

“Comparisons are odious” as my Mum used to say, but I hope this little comparison doesn’t pong too much. I have a range a little competitions of my own, a language bench mark, based on “The Computer Language Benchmarks Game” (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org), between IronPython and F#, with measurements for C# thrown in as a kind of control group. I would have liked to chuck in the new IronRuby language too, but I had problems finding a current release. This was largely inspired by the benchmarks Ben Jackson posted to the hubfs.net (http://cs.hubfs.net/forums/thread/3196.aspx), thanks Ben!

I recieved my copies of Foundation of F# today. Am I pleased about it? See for yourself:

Feedback:

As I alluded to in my earlier post I’ve wanted to find the time to write a longer post on developing Silverlight application. Using Silverlight is very straightforward and does actually require you to install anything other than F# and the Silverlight runtime. What out when installing the runtime, turn version are available confusingly name “1.0 beta” and “1.1 alpha”. It is the “1.1 alpha” version that you need as this the only one that includes the new version of the CLR, the dynamic language runtime or the “DLR” (not to be confused with the Docklands Light Rail).

I’m too tired to write a proper blog post about this but I managed to port DonSyme’s Game of Life Demo that comes with the F# Distribution to Silverlight. It’s not a full port as there were some UI events that I couldn’t get to work for love nor money – I think these maybe bugs in Silverlight itself. However the game does look pretty cool. Also Silverlight currently has no way to marshal back to the UI thread which makes multithreading a bit difficult.

I know I've been very quite here lately. The reason for this is I've spend a lot of time working on _the book_. Anyway, all thats nearly over now, so hopefully I can get back to being a bit more chatty. Anyway, here is the announcement that I've made just a few moments ago on the hubfs.net that says its almost finished printing:
http://cs.hubfs.net/blogs/roberts_strange_f_blog/archive/2007/05/20/3153.aspx

You may have noticed that strangelights.com has a nice you look and feel. This was prompted by a major overhaul of the software I’m running. I upgraded from .text blogging software to subtext. While the difference between the two isn’t huge but I’m really pleased with the upgrade because they seem to have fixed virtually everything I didn’t like about .text. Also .text took nearly the whole day to setup and required me to hack the code base for to get it working with my former ISP, brinkster, whereas subtext only took about an hour to get going, including transferring all the data from .text and didn’t require any code changes.

So apparently there’s an election for a new president in France at the moment. I don’t know how much appears in the media outside of France, but here you can read about little else. Well that’s not strictly true – but it seems to me no edition of my preferred newspaper, le Parisien (also probably the paper that one that requires the lowest level of French), is complete without at least 2 stories about the left’s presidential hopeful, Ségolène Royal, and one about the right’s Nicolas Sarkozy.