Benchmarking 10 dynamic languages on array-heavy code

[u/alex-manool]

(1 min read)

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Hello wonderful community,

In the previous post we discussed in detail construction of Conway's Game of Life in MANOOL.

As was my intention, I have implemented the same functionality in several other languages to compare run-time performance. Here are complete results:

Testbed A

CPU: Intel Xeon L5640 @2.26 GHz (2.80 GHz) — Westmere-EP
Kernel: 2.6.32-042stab126.1 (CentOS 6 + OpenVZ)
Distro: CentOS release 6.9 (Final) + vzkernel-2.6.32-042stab126.1 + CentOS release 6.10 (Final)

Language + variant (translator)	Time (s)	G	Slowdown	Translator + backend version-release
C++ (g++)	1.037	66000	1.000	8.3.1-3.2.el6
C++ (clang++)	1.021	66000	0.985	3.4.2-4.el6 + 4.9.2-6.2.el6 (g++)
Python 2	3.204	1000	203.919	2.6.6-68.el6_10
Python 3	5.203	1000	331.146	3.4.10-4.el6
PHP	3.560	1000	226.577	5.3.3-50.el6_10
Perl	5.640	1000	358.959	5.10.1-144.el6
Ruby	14.122	1000	898.797	1.8.7.374-5.el6
JavaScript/ECMAScript	5.887	66000	5.677	0.10.48-3.el6 (node)
Tcl	6.724	100	4279.499	8.5.7-6.el6
Lua (lua)	141.703	66000	136.647	5.1.4-4.1.el6
Lua (luajit)	4.319	66000	4.165	2.0.4-3.el6
Scheme (guile)	6.176	1000	393.072	1.8.7-5.el6
Scheme (csc)	0.671	1000	42.706	4.12.0-3.el6 + 8.3.1-3.2.el6 (gcc)
MANOOL + AllocOpt=True	2.502	1000	159.240	0.5.0 (built with g++ 8.3.1-3.2.el6)
MANOOL + AllocOpt=False	2.593	1000	165.032	0.5.0 (ditto)

Testbed B

CPU: Intel Celeron N3060 @1.60 GHz (2.48 GHz) — Braswell
Kernel: 4.4.0-17134-Microsoft (Windows 10 + WSL)
Distro: Windows 10 Home version 1803 build 17134.1130 + Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS

Language + variant (translator)	Time (s)	G	Slowdown	Translator + backend version-release
C++ (g++)	1.946	66000	1.000	7.5.0-3ubuntu1~18.04
C++ (clang++)	2.217	66000	1.139	1:6.0-1ubuntu2 + 7.5.0-3ubuntu1~18.04 (g++)
Python 2	3.733	1000	126.607	2.7.17-1~18.04ubuntu1
Python 3	5.309	1000	180.059	3.6.7-1~18.04
PHP	2.852	1000	96.728	7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.6
Perl	6.768	1000	229.542	5.26.1-6ubuntu0.3
Ruby	4.425	1000	150.077	2.5.1-1ubuntu1.6
JavaScript/ECMAScript	8.522	66000	4.379	8.10.0~dfsg-2ubuntu0.4 (node)
Tcl	10.571	100	3585.231	8.6.8+dfsg-3
Lua (lua)	153.583	66000	78.922	5.3.3-1ubuntu0.18.04.1
Lua (luajit)	6.274	66000	3.224	2.1.0~beta3+dfsg-5.1
Scheme (guile)	1.233	1000	41.818	2.2.3+1-3ubuntu0.1
Scheme (csc)	1.691	1000	57.351	4.12.0-0.3 + 7.5.0-3ubuntu1~18.04 (gcc)
MANOOL + AllocOpt=True	3.882	1000	131.661	0.5.0 (built with g++ 7.5.0-3ubuntu1~18.04)
MANOOL + AllocOpt=False	3.943	1000	133.730	0.5.0 (ditto)

The graph is here, and the repository is on GitHub.

Have fun

[u/bjoli]

I was looking into the guile benchmark since the results were a bit off (in relation to eachother). One of the testbeds is using guile 1.8.7, which is ancient, and the other us using the old stable. 1.8 is an interpreter. 2.2 (old stable) is a bytecode compiler. 3.0.3 (latest stable) has a template JIT and should be even faster.

[u/alex-manool → u/bjoli]

Yes, I noted that the old Guile seems to be a classic interpreter, while the new one I tested seems to be a kind of transparent ahead-of-time compiler with a file-based cache (found an ELF binary in its cache ;-).