[mercury-users] ICFP'00 Contest Results

[Tyson Dowd]

On 03-Oct-2000, Ralph Becket <rbeck at microsoft.com> wrote:
> Looking at the timings, I think we suffered badly for two reasons:
> 1. Mercury's floating point performance sucks (both the OCaml and
> Haskell compilers support unboxed floats); and

Yep.  Improving floating point is a another project that we'd love
someone to do, but it seems to be a reasonably big job.

Recompiling in hlc.gc grade might help somewhat.  However there are a
few unimplemented bits and pieces stopping us from running the ray
tracer in this grade (compare is not implemented for univ yet).

> 2. not having the bounding spheres optimization really shafted us
> (at least, it looks like the judges were using the non-BS version).

Yes, this seems to be the case.  IIRC we had some last minute bugs with
that code, so took it out (correctness first).  

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #  Surreal humour isn't everyone's cup of fur.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # 
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #
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