Personal Bytes

As I’ve told you before, I’m a performing maniac. I love benchmarks, optimization, profiling and deciding based on the circumstances. I like to manage tradeoffs.

So here’s a great benchmark website that puts up to the test several programming languages, including the very well known Perl, Java, C, Python or Ruby.

If it’s great then it’s supposed to be allusive by itself. And it is. Nevertheless, I’d like to make some comments that may slip by.

To start off, as you may easily see, there are raw benchmarks and language implementations. The former compares known algorithms and usual a routines to check out the performance. Some examples are recursion, calculating fractals sets or computing DNA sequences.

Overall, C (compiled with gcc[1]) still outperforms all the others. Haskell, Eiffel and Java are also capable of reaching interesting results.

But what’s really interesting to read is the comparasion between the programming languages (evaluating CPU and memory use). The target language is Perl.

Basically, PHP and Ruby loose by far to Perl. On the other hand, Python outperforms Perl by some crystal clear margins.

As for the non scripting languages, C outperforms Java (we all knew that. Nevertheless, I’d rather trade a slowdown by the OO capabilities of Java — for most of the cases).

[1] - I didn’t mean that gcc is the fastest compiler. Only stated the fact that it was compiled with gcc.