Hello World execution time

Interesting but correlates with the number of files and libraries the interpreter must read or parse. Anything that's quite self-contained is fast; anything that needs to look up and read lots of files is slow.<p>All I can say is that Java startup time is abysmal. Still, and after fifteen years. Java was dead slow in the 90's and it's dead slow these days when compared to anything else. I love Clojure but Java startup time rules it out for anything else but long-running processes or, when coding, using repl via swank.

In a reply, he adds Haskell (compiled with ghc)<p><a href="http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2011-03/msg00090.html" rel="nofollow">http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2011-03/m...</a>

The Python interpreter does an implicit "import site" on initialization.<p>You can disable it using the -S option if/when you care about startup time.<p>Here are some numbers on my MacBook Pro:<p>$ ./run.sh bash hello.sh<p>median 0.002<p>$ ./run.sh python hello.py<p>median 0.016<p>$ ./run.sh python -S hello.py<p>median 0.008

Unless I'm mistaken, the "Bash" benchmark is actually just measuring the amount of time it takes a C program to read an argument and print, instead of just a C program printing.<p>Assuming the bash program was: `echo "hello, world!"`<p>Edit: I likely am mistaken. Chances are this was done using the builtin 'echo', not '/bin/echo'. The builtin is always faster (though putting them in a file (as is the only fair way to do it) slows them both down of course).

I guess java is so slow because you have the initial over-head of starting the jvm. I'm guessing that subsequent prints of "Hello world" would be somewhat faster.<p>This article is basically trolling java, and it seems a number of people have taken the bait. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. You'll choose the one most appropriate to the task required. If that's printing "Hello World" to the console then fine, but I doubt many people would think "java" when presented with this requirement.

The solution to java's slow startup time is gcj. Once compiled with gcc's java compiler, a java hello world will have C like startup times.<p><pre><code> echo 'class Hello {public static void main(String[] args) {System.out.println("hello, world");}}' &#62; Hello.java gcj --main=Hello -o Hello Hello.java time ./Hello echo 'main() { printf("hello world\n");}' | gcc -x c -o hello - time ./hello</code></pre>

With disk caches primed, the main culprit may be the dynamic linker. Some of those environments (Java, Perl, Python, PHP that others mention in this thread) always load substantial number of dynamic libraries before doing anything useful. That doesn't come free. Numberous symbols have to be resolved, some static data initialized. There's non-trivial VirtualMemory to set up for such libraries, too.<p>For some more info: <a href="http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/" rel="nofollow">http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/</a><p>EDIT: a micro-benchmark between static and dynamic C program:<p><pre><code> gcc -- static a.c time (for i in `seq 1024`; do ./a.out &#62; /dev/null; done; ) real 0m0.958s #### gcc a.c # that's dynamic linking time (for i in `seq 1024`; do ./a.out &#62; /dev/null; done; ) real 0m1.292s </code></pre> ...and that's just libc alone! Those times were quite stable across several runs, so it's not some random one-time fluctuation.<p>The code:<p><pre><code> #include &#60;stdio.h&#62; int main(void) { puts("hello world!"); return 0; }</code></pre>

Ignorance and stupidity is running amok. This kind of trivial benchmark is not only incredibly dumb but is ACTIVELY HARMFUL to the programming community. Consider the conclusion drawn by author a few posts down in the thread<p>"Astonishing indeed. The whole thing confirmed my hunch that Bash, Chicken, and C provide a complete toolset to tackle 99.9% of programming needs."<p>No no no! Try running anything non-trival in bash or python and compare that to the java. Obviously if all you ever want to do with programming is write little boring scripts then you shouldn't be using a language like java in the first place. For anything mildly interesting and performance intensive Java is pretty much a no brainer only behind c/c++ amongst the major languages. For a site with REAL benchmarks which actually mean anything unlike the language fanboyism in this posted article checkout <a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php" rel="nofollow">http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...</a>

Just tried LuaJIT on a MacBook:<p><pre><code> 4 ms: C, gcc (median real time) 4 ms: bash 5 ms: LuaJIT 2.0.0-beta4 73 ms: Python2.6.1 </code></pre> So Bash still wins! I wonder if it gets any special advantage from getting invoked from itself.

To my great astonishment, Ruby's performance was much closer to bash than Python in my own test: 0.572sec for 101 runs in Ruby, versus 4.276sec with Python and 0.318sec with bash. I now feel slightly less bad for all those shell scripts I've written in Ruby instead of bash.

Is this level of micro-benchmarking actually useful for the given use-case?<p>When "writing shell scripts / cron jobs / random commandline utilities" I believe my priorities are<p>1) Does it work? 2) How easy is this to write? 3) How easy is this to read?<p>In that order.

Someone want to do a test for Scala? Why can't I have it all?

when will people stop comparing languages based on their runtime speeds?

that has got to be the most useful language benchmark of all times... for those that don't go past the "Hello World" step that is.

What about PHP? Will it have same results as C?