5 ms·

Do you have any papers comparing Scryer with other prolog systems (like SWI-prolog or SICStus prolog) performance-wise ?

jodrellblank 2y ago
There are some benchmarks here of SWI Prolog's benchmark suite on diffrent Prolog systems by Jan Wielemaker the SWI Prolog author: https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-benchmark-suite-comparing-8-prolog-systems/6997#the-modern-systems-vs-swi-prolog-2 https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-... He finds Scryer performs worse, which he does comment on, he also explains some tradeoffs and historic choices in SWI's design which affects its performance. I think I have seen the author of Scryer saying that's not surprising and Scryer is still building up core functionality where SWI has had 30+ years to optimise, but I don't remember where I read that. SWI has a document explaining some strengths and weaknesses regarding performance: https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=swiorother https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=swiorother Edit: some discussion on Scryer previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966133
- jfmc 2y ago
  Another table (in the same thread) comparing more systems: https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-benchmark-suite-comparing-8-prolog-systems/6997/31 https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-...
- b800h 2y ago
  So SWI appears to be more performant, it has an open license, so as per the GGP's claim regarding Scryer in the post above, it must not be ISO-compliant?
  - derdi 2y ago
    Or maybe the GGP was wrong about performance? Some default settings in SWI are not ISO-compliant (for example, it uses a string type that does not exist in ISO). But these are minor things that won't usually trip you up when feeding it ISO code. You can set flags to get it to conform in the way you want. And you should set flags whenever you want your ISO Prolog programs to be portable, because the standard is very lax and leaves a lot of things implementation-defined. But it specifies the flags to get implementations into the state you want.
  - jodrellblank 2y ago
    That's right; comedian Emo Phillips had a bit about it: "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody understand me." I said, "What's so special about you?" He said, "I'm a computer guy." I said, "Me too! Desktop, tablet, console, smartphone?" He said "Desktop, mostly", I said "Me, too! Mac, Linux or Windows?" He said, "Any, I'm a programmer." I said, "Me, too! which style? OOP, Imperative, Functional, Logic, Array, Stack" He said, "Logic." I said, "Me, too! What subset? Answer Set Programming, Abductive Programming, Prolog, Datalog?" He said, "Prolog." I said, "Me, too! Conformant with the ISO/IEC 13211-1:1995 (core) standard term syntax for the period character or non-conformant extention decried by members of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG17 working group?" He said, "SWI Prolog 7" I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624442 or read more seriously here: - https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/SWI7_and_ISO https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/SWI7_and...
    - rlupi 2y ago
      I can't help. > "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody understand me." I said, "What's so special about you?" He said: "I don't want to jump".
      - drekipus 2y ago
        I don't get it * Jumps off a bridge
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - triska 2y ago
    A key performance attraction of Scryer Prolog is its space efficiency for representing lists of characters, yielding a 24 times (!) more compact representation than a naive implementation would. With Scryer Prolog and other recent systems that implement this representation, such as Trealla Prolog, we can easily process many GBs of text with DCGs, arguably realizing the full potential of the originally intended use case of Prolog for the first time. Trealla Prolog goes even further already, and allows overhead-free processing of files, using the system-call mmap(2) to virtually map files to memory, delegating the mapping to the operating system instead of the Prolog system. The linked benchmarks do not test these aspects at all, and in addition use a version of Scryer Prolog that was completely outdated already at the time the benchmarks were made: The benchmarks use Scryer Prolog v0.8.127, which was tagged in August 2020, more than 3 years (!) before the benchmarks were posted. The linked benchmarks thus ignore more than 3 years of development of a system that was at that time 7 years old. Newer versions of Scryer Prolog perform much better due to many improvements that have since been applied. More than 1700 commits were applied between these dates. In the face of the 24-fold reduction of memory use that the above-mentioned efficient string representation enables, small factors of difference in speed between different systems are in my opinion barely worth mentioning at all in any direction. And yes, in addition to this great space efficiency, the strong ISO conformance of Scryer Prolog is also a major attraction especially when using it in highly regulated areas. For example, here is a recently envisaged application of Scryer Prolog in the context of machine protection systems (MPS) of giant particle accelerators, where adherence to industry standards is of great importance for warranty reasons among others: https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2441 https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2441 As another example, a medical application of Scryer Prolog, in the highly regulated domain of oncology trial design: https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2332 https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2332 Here is an overview of syntactic ISO conformance of different Prolog systems: https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/conformity_testing https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/conformi...
    - derdi 2y ago
      > adherence to industry standards is of great importance for warranty reasons among others This is mostly a nice talking point rather than an actual thing, right? Scryer's license contains the usual all-caps NO WARRANTY and NO FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE wording. Also, the links you provided describe these applications without references to warranties and standards and regulation. The users in these super-sensitive domains don't seem as sensitive about them as you claim.

jodrellblank 2y ago

There are some benchmarks here of SWI Prolog's benchmark suite on diffrent Prolog systems by Jan Wielemaker the SWI Prolog author: https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-benchmark-suite-comparing-8-prolog-systems/6997#the-modern-systems-vs-swi-prolog-2 https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-... He finds Scryer performs worse, which he does comment on, he also explains some tradeoffs and historic choices in SWI's design which affects its performance. I think I have seen the author of Scryer saying that's not surprising and Scryer is still building up core functionality where SWI has had 30+ years to optimise, but I don't remember where I read that. SWI has a document explaining some strengths and weaknesses regarding performance: https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=swiorother https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=swiorother Edit: some discussion on Scryer previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966133

jfmc 2y ago
Another table (in the same thread) comparing more systems: https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-benchmark-suite-comparing-8-prolog-systems/6997/31 https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/porting-the-swi-prolog-...
b800h 2y ago
So SWI appears to be more performant, it has an open license, so as per the GGP's claim regarding Scryer in the post above, it must not be ISO-compliant?
- derdi 2y ago
  Or maybe the GGP was wrong about performance? Some default settings in SWI are not ISO-compliant (for example, it uses a string type that does not exist in ISO). But these are minor things that won't usually trip you up when feeding it ISO code. You can set flags to get it to conform in the way you want. And you should set flags whenever you want your ISO Prolog programs to be portable, because the standard is very lax and leaves a lot of things implementation-defined. But it specifies the flags to get implementations into the state you want.
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  That's right; comedian Emo Phillips had a bit about it: "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody understand me." I said, "What's so special about you?" He said, "I'm a computer guy." I said, "Me too! Desktop, tablet, console, smartphone?" He said "Desktop, mostly", I said "Me, too! Mac, Linux or Windows?" He said, "Any, I'm a programmer." I said, "Me, too! which style? OOP, Imperative, Functional, Logic, Array, Stack" He said, "Logic." I said, "Me, too! What subset? Answer Set Programming, Abductive Programming, Prolog, Datalog?" He said, "Prolog." I said, "Me, too! Conformant with the ISO/IEC 13211-1:1995 (core) standard term syntax for the period character or non-conformant extention decried by members of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG17 working group?" He said, "SWI Prolog 7" I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624442 or read more seriously here: - https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/SWI7_and_ISO https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/SWI7_and...
  - rlupi 2y ago
    I can't help. > "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody understand me." I said, "What's so special about you?" He said: "I don't want to jump".
    - drekipus 2y ago
      I don't get it * Jumps off a bridge
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- triska 2y ago
  A key performance attraction of Scryer Prolog is its space efficiency for representing lists of characters, yielding a 24 times (!) more compact representation than a naive implementation would. With Scryer Prolog and other recent systems that implement this representation, such as Trealla Prolog, we can easily process many GBs of text with DCGs, arguably realizing the full potential of the originally intended use case of Prolog for the first time. Trealla Prolog goes even further already, and allows overhead-free processing of files, using the system-call mmap(2) to virtually map files to memory, delegating the mapping to the operating system instead of the Prolog system. The linked benchmarks do not test these aspects at all, and in addition use a version of Scryer Prolog that was completely outdated already at the time the benchmarks were made: The benchmarks use Scryer Prolog v0.8.127, which was tagged in August 2020, more than 3 years (!) before the benchmarks were posted. The linked benchmarks thus ignore more than 3 years of development of a system that was at that time 7 years old. Newer versions of Scryer Prolog perform much better due to many improvements that have since been applied. More than 1700 commits were applied between these dates. In the face of the 24-fold reduction of memory use that the above-mentioned efficient string representation enables, small factors of difference in speed between different systems are in my opinion barely worth mentioning at all in any direction. And yes, in addition to this great space efficiency, the strong ISO conformance of Scryer Prolog is also a major attraction especially when using it in highly regulated areas. For example, here is a recently envisaged application of Scryer Prolog in the context of machine protection systems (MPS) of giant particle accelerators, where adherence to industry standards is of great importance for warranty reasons among others: https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2441 https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2441 As another example, a medical application of Scryer Prolog, in the highly regulated domain of oncology trial design: https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2332 https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/discussions/2332 Here is an overview of syntactic ISO conformance of different Prolog systems: https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/conformity_testing https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/conformi...
  - derdi 2y ago
    > adherence to industry standards is of great importance for warranty reasons among others This is mostly a nice talking point rather than an actual thing, right? Scryer's license contains the usual all-caps NO WARRANTY and NO FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE wording. Also, the links you provided describe these applications without references to warranties and standards and regulation. The users in these super-sensitive domains don't seem as sensitive about them as you claim.