Worth noting that most APL interpreters and the J interpreter are significantly slower than (most) k/q interpreters. I'm not sure if the performance argument is relevant for all of them.
Arthur Whitney's a biased source, of course, but the kparc site has a bunch of little programs in which he beats the equivalents from rather influential people (like the UNIX/Plan 9/Inferno authors
http://www.kparc.com/z/bell.k ) for bragging rights.
k losing to some really nicely-written C and most Fortran seems plausible, Java and C++ not so much.
Is there publicly available information on what makes k/q interpreters so much faster? Or is that part of the secret sauce that the companies maintaining those interpreters sell? I assume it's the latter, but hope for the former, since good descriptions of the technical work that goes into high-performance systems usually makes for fascinating reading.
Arthur Whitney's a biased source, of course, but the kparc site has a bunch of little programs in which he beats the equivalents from rather influential people (like the UNIX/Plan 9/Inferno authors http://www.kparc.com/z/bell.k ) for bragging rights.
k losing to some really nicely-written C and most Fortran seems plausible, Java and C++ not so much.