MUmunificent·Dec 27, 2013
I've been hacking on a little scripting language of my own lately[1]. To get a handle on its perf, I have a few small benchmarks[2] I run that compare it against Lua (5.1.5), Python (2.7.5), and Ruby (2.0.0p247). (All of those and my language are bytecode-compiled, dynamically typed languages, hence that comparison.)
I happen to have Ruby 2.0 installed, and I was surprised to see it handily beat the other languages. I had expected Ruby to be the slowest of the pack, but they've apparently made big strides in 2.0.
On the off chance that anyone is curious, here's the results of running them on my machine:
binary_trees - wren 3531 0.28s
binary_trees - lua 1366 0.73s 258.40%
binary_trees - python 1420 0.70s 248.64%
binary_trees - ruby 3170 0.32s 111.39%
fib - wren 2688 0.37s
fib - lua
Read the rest
2998 0.33s 89.65%
fib - python 1390 0.72s 193.38%
fib - ruby 3645 0.27s 73.74%
for - wren 9092 0.11s
for - lua 9387 0.11s 96.86%
for - python 3171 0.32s 286.74%
for - ruby 8319 0.12s 109.30%
method_call - wren 4703 0.21s
method_call - lua 1780 0.56s 264.20%
method_call - python 806 1.24s 583.33%
method_call - ruby 3408 0.29s 138.02%
Those numbers are score, time, and percentage. Score is basically 1/time, just to yield a number where bigger is better. Time is best of ten runs. Percentage is how my language's score compares to that one. So, for example, the 264.20% lua method_call score means my language is about 2.6x faster than Lua on a benchmark designed to stress dynamic method call performance.
[1] https://github.com/munificent/wren
[2] https://github.com/munificent/wren/tree/master/benchmark