plb2

> Truffle Ruby is as fast as V8 already and MRI yJIT and jRuby are catching up fast According to which benchmark? At my hand [1], node is ~60% faster than TruffleRuby and over an order of magnitude faster than yjit v3.3.0. [1] https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2?tab=readme-ov-file#a...

See also https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2 ...where I provided the SBCL solutions, so there's probably still a significant chunk of performance to be squeezed out.

https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2 - limited but broad comparison across a large number of languages. Swift and Nim both compare favourably to C.

https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2/blob/master/README.m... Synthetic benchmarks aside, I think as far as average (spring boots of the world) code goes, Go beats Java almost every time, often in less lines than the usual pom.xml

The creator of Programming Language Benchmarks 2 is on Apple Silicon, and apparently SBCL compilation works out of the box: <https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2>.

I'd throw Python out too, as it's just far too slow*, which would set wrong expectations for learners. While itmcaan be sped up by writing everything in C and calling it from Python you've already thrown C out, so that's not an option. The languages remaining are very unfortunate though: JS is infamously the language designed in 14 days, and Go is a Google project, so I wouldn't be surprised if programming in it awakens Deep Ones to feed on your sanity. * <https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2>

> There were no noticeable performance improvements in the course of the last two years. In fairness, Python did get faster. Python 3.9 took 82 seconds for sudoku solving and 62 seconds for interval query. Python 3.11 took 53 and 43 seconds, respectively [1]. v3.12 may be better. That said, whether the speedup is noticeable can be subjective. 10x vs 15x slower than v8 may not make much difference mentally. [1] https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2

I wouldn't be so enthusiastic. Look at other languages that have JIT now: Ruby and PHP. After years of efforts, they are still an order of magnitude slower than V8 and even PyPy [1]. It seems to me that you need to design a JIT implementation from ground up to get good performance – V8, Dart and LuaJIT are like this; if you start with a pure interpreter, it may be difficult to speed it up later. [1] https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2

A curious thing about Swift: after https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2/pull/23, the matrix multiplication example is comparable to C and Rust. However, I don’t see a way to idiomatically optimise the sudoku example, whose main overhead is allocating several arrays each time solve() is called. Apparently, in Swift there is no such thing as static array allocation. That’s very unfortunate.

"Nonetheless, because most benchmarks run for several seconds, including the startup time does not greatly affect the results." https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2#startup-time

C, Nim and Zig all benefit from static allocation and it's available in rust, so seems fair? also, `const N` is used in rust's nqueen test, so figured it would be fine. someone posted an `.iter().zip()` solution which benchmarks only a little slower (+10ms) than static allocation: https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2/pull/4#issuecomment-...