[hifromwork]

I didn't downvote you (I'm just reading this thread for the first time), but I don't get your original argument. Usually benchmarking two languages means either:

* microbenchmarks comparing speed of doing stupid things (like adding 10000 integers or sorting a list with bubblesort 1000 times)

* 'real world'-ish benchmarks comparing idiomatic solutions in two languages doing the same thing

In both cases it doesn't matter (much) how big a standard library is. If you want to compare two languages doing something complex, you need to have -standard or not- implementation of that something for both languages.

But maybe I (and possibly others) have missed your point?

[crabbone]

Well, people who write such benchmarks have no business writing benchmarks, and the comments to such comparison would usually say as much.

Such benchmarks don't compare anything in a meaningful way, and, in the second case, don't even compare what they claim to compare (you don't compare the languages if you run some third-party code on top of it, which has nothing to do with how the language itself is implemented).

These "benchmarks" just score some holly-war points for people who either irrationally like, or irrationally hate a particular language...

[igouy]

> you don't compare the languages if you run some third-party code on top of it, which has nothing to do with how the language itself is implemented

What if "the language itself" provides arbitrary precision arithmetic by wrapping GMP and GMP is not written in "the language itself" ?

https://gmplib.org/

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/integer-gmp

[animuchan]

So we're in a "no true Scotsman" situation then, where no benchmark is ever useful.

I kind of disagree on the meaningfulness of microbenchmarks, they give a feel for the performance, even if it's not a perfectly useful apples-to-apples comparison.

Like, if decoding a large JSON takes 3 milliseconds in one language and 2 minutes in another, that's signaling that the second language is a worse fit for certain projects. Even if the benchmark isn't super rigorous.