Why Compiled Languages?
This is a very simple experiment to demonstrate the importance of compiled languages over dynamic or interpreted languages when it comes to system programming or high degree of efficiency.
Experiment
A simple loop operation to sum up the numbers from 1 to 1,000,000,000 (one billion).
Execution
Clone the repo, then open src/
directory.
C++ run:
$ g++ cplusplus.cpp -o cpp -O3
$ ./cpp
Java run:
$ javac java.java
$ java Java
C# run:
Note: use mono
on macOS/linux only.
$ csc csharp.cs
$ mono csharp.exe
Python run:
$ python python.py
Ruby run:
$ ruby ruby.rb
Javascript (node) run:
$ node javascript.js
Go run:
$ go build go.go
$ ./go
Evaluation
To obtain the time spent on execution, measure the last line of each run with time
multiple times and get the average.
For example:
$ time java Java
...
real 0m0.395s
user 0m0.361s
sys 0m0.028s
$ /usr/bin/time -l java Java
...
22679552 maximum resident set size
Results
Results breakdown:
(macOS mid 2015, 2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM)
Language | Elapsed Time (second) | Memory (MB) |
---|---|---|
C++ | 0.015 | 7.49 |
Java | 0.39 | 23 |
C# | 1.172 | 11.88 |
Ruby | 21.77 | 13.45 |
Python | 17.89 | 4.66 |
JS (node) | 0.873 | 22.97 |
Go | 0.284 | 1.56 |
Clearly, the way of optimization of this pure calculation logic in compiled versions as we see in static compiled languages outperformed the interperted languages (except nodeJs
) drastically in terms of speed. Additionally, Java
and C#
results show the outstanding optimization made to the compiler and runtime JVM
/CLR
to perform nearly identical to the low level languages, for such essential looping computing.
The two figures below show the comparison between C++
, C#
, Java
, Ruby
, and Python
languages in terms of both speed (time) and memory (space).
Contribution
All PRs are welcome for other languages or improvements on Github.
License
MIT.
Contributors
- Abdullah Barrak (@abarrak).
- Eliot Akira (@eliot-akira).