

Which programming languages are the fastest? - hitechsites
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
Surprised that LISP is 20x faster than PHP or Perl in this benchmark (median times). It is even faster than Python and of course Ruby.
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angusgr
As the page says, "No. Which programming language implementations have the
fastest benchmark programs?"

Which begs the question - aside from macho bragging rights, exactly what good
is this kind of information?

Assume I did have a specific problem case for which performance in terms of
memory, time or LoC mattered. As a first step, I'd write a specific
benchmarkable implementation of my own problem (or one very like it.) Then I'd
need to profile and optimise that implementation in my chosen language(s), as
well as stop and think laterally about ways I might be able to optimise around
that specific problem.

This is all assuming I'm working on a greenfields project where I have
absolute free choice of language & runtime environment. Which happens for my
personal projects, but never yet for a professional one.

Not to mention that in all other cases apart from this hypothetical where
performance matters, I would take the most human-readable program over the
most fast, lean or concise one.

Long story short, at no point can I see myself stopping and saying to myself.
"You know what I need now? I need to see which programming language can
generate a Mandelbrot set bitmap with the smallest memory footprint, without
using any 'unfair' optimisation techniques."

~~~
wccrawford
It matters sometimes.

A while back, I wrote a program to solve a puzzle. The more complex the
puzzle, the longer it took to solve. Today, I might come up with a better
algorithm, but back then, all I could find was a brute-force approach. The
most complex puzzle I had seen at the time was taking hours to run.

The program was written in VB6, and it was just wasn't mean for CPU-intensive
programs like that. If I were to write that program again today, I'd be
looking at optimizing the code for speed, starting with the language.

So yes, the question -does- matter. Sometimes.

~~~
angusgr
_Today, I might come up with a better algorithm, but back then, all I could
find was a brute-force approach. The most complex puzzle I had seen at the
time was taking hours to run._

I bet that you could come up with a better algorithm now, even in VB6 if you
had to, to get the run time down. I've seen people take "optimised" C
solutions that run in hours and make them run in minutes, just by rewriting
the algorithm and rethinking basic assumptions.

------
lvh
I seem to remember that at one point, Pypy, Luajit and perhaps a Ruby
interpreter were removed from the races.

Anyone have any details on why that happened? These destroyed my ability to
link to the shootout as data for showing that languages don't matter as much
as implementations do, a nuance many newbies miss :(

~~~
edsrzf
The benchmark game now only shows one implementation per language. The reasons
aren't very satisfying IMO, but see this thread:

[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.pypy/7303/focus=73...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.pypy/7303/focus=7352)

~~~
igouy
If you want "the reasons" see the Help page -

<http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#implementationx>

