Progress on Problem 93-ish, slow languages are fun.

I spent much of this evening coding up a solution to problem 93 in the Io programming languages. After I went through fixing all of the various errors that I had because of not getting the at-times confusing or just odd syntax right, I tried running my program, and it ran, and ran, and ran giving no answer. Turns out, it takes about 15 seconds for it to test just 10 of the couple thousand cases it has to check. After observing this, I decided to run a bit of a test to see just how slow the language is. As I had done all of my work with sieve timing before, that seemed like a good example of something I could code up quickly to test. A prime sieve to find all primes less than 100000 takes about 6.5 seconds to run in Io. That can be compared to about 10ms in C, and primes less than a million took too long for me to wait for in Io (more than a minute), and takes about .1s in C. So, this test showed me that Io could be expected to be at least 600 times slower than C code - and that's assuming no operations are particularly slow, such as array accesses, etc. So, based on this result, I think I will have to retire Io as the language for 93, and instead use it to solve an earlier problem, and use another language on 93. Though I must say, a 600x + slowdown compared to C is kind of impressive, and a sign that it will be hard to solve anything in close to a minute in this language.