[fpc-other] Which programming language is fastest?

[Isaac Gouy]

http://lists.freepascal.org/lists/fpc-pascal/2011-May/028931.html


1) The blog post seems obsessed with rankings - "From the top five at 2007 to the 14th on 2011" - as-though rankings were shown on those benchmarks game web pages, and as-though rankings are the most informative basis for comparing program performance.

Those benchmarks game web pages do not show a ranking number - in a deliberate effort to discourage exactly the kind of bogus comparison made in the blog post.


2) The blog post states - "C# and Java, both interpreted languages".

No. The standard implementations of C# and Java, the implementations of C# and Java that are shown on the benchmarks game website are not just byte code "interpreters".

The benchmarks game web page for Java even explains when the Java VM compiles from byte code -

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/java.php#about


3) The blog post shows summary statistics from one of the 4 sets of up-to-date measurements shown on the benchmarks game website - but never mentions that those measurements were made on a quad-core machine.

The blog post never mentions that several of the C++ programs were written to use multi-core but the corresponding Free Pascal programs were not - and that has increased the performance difference.

The blog post could have avoided that confusion by examining measurements where the programs were forced to use just one core.

Better still, just compare the C++ and Free Pascal program performance directly -

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/pascal.php