Xah Talk Show 2023-01-07 Emacs Lisp, WolframLang, Speed Comparison for Find/Replace
done livestream. whopping 2.5 hours. but good! this i wanted to do since few months ago.
today, we did speed comparison of elisp and wolfram lang.
all code written from scratch.
so if u wanna see how its done, watch it.
but the 2.5 hours, partly due to some setup the context, a bit chatting on other things, and some 20 min debug of a silly path error in WL.
overall, we got some results.
the gist of this livestream, is to prove my haunch, that when doing find replace, with lots pairs of strings, elisp speed will beat all other langs. due to, elisp buffer datatype (aka rope or similar).
though, am not sure. because, in golang, once u turn the giant buffer content to slice of runes (aka smart array of chars), elisp buffer datatype may not have advantage.
also, in wolfram lang, since it's simply a just 2 function calls, WL has efficient internal algorithm for the actual find replace, so there, elisp maybe not faster neither.
but for python, js, i think elisp may be faster. cuz there, python and js, their strings are immutable. each change means recreating whole string. unless u code them by using array of chars. in js, that'd be using the specialized array buffer object. in python, something similar. Would be a bit involved.
