The Computer Language
24.09 Benchmarks Game

Measured : Which programming language is fastest?


My question is if anyone here has any experience with simplistic benchmarking and could tell me which things to test for in order to get a simple idea of each language's general performance?

There's more than one right answer.

For the fastest contributed programs —


The box plot charts show a visual summary of the data: medians, dispersion, skew.


Benchmark program CPU seconds compared to the fastest for selected programming language implementations.

For a simple program —


The current Ruby mandelbrot multicore programs are 7x faster than this simple Ruby transliteration and the exhaustively-optimised + multicore + vector-instruction C programs are more-like 25x faster than this simple C program.

  source code secs mem gz    
  Intel C 23.62 20,580 433    
  C gcc #2 25.04 19,708 412    
  C gcc 26.30 19,708 433    
  Go #2 26.67 19,808 500    
  C# .NET 27.23 32,036 493    
  Go 27.30 19,808 469    
  Java 29.28 43,792 445    
  PHP #3 127.57 19,804 418    
  PHP #2 156.45 19,804 397    
  PHP 167.49 19,804 390    
  Java -Xint 8 min 35,168 445    
  Ruby #2 19 min 21,248 313    
  Ruby 20 min 20,992 341    
  Python 3 #3 20 min 19,660 392    
  Toit 28 min 68,992 387    
  Python 3 #2 28 min 19,660 337    
  Python 3 56 min 19,660 380    
  Matz's Ruby 2h 39 min 19,680 341    
  Matz's Ruby #2 3h 06 min 19,860 313    

Transliterations are not necessarily idiomatic. When the Ruby #2 and Python #2 programs are most idiomatic they are furthest from identical — are they similar-enough to be comparable for your purposes? (The Python #2 program uses a built-in complex-number type.)

The slightly-moderately-highly-wildly ("I spent two weekends on this") optimised mandelbrot programs are not identical — does that matter for your purposes? And [pdf] As fast as C or As fast as SSE and AVX?


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