Benchmarking programming languages?

How can we benchmark a programming language?
We can't - we benchmark programming language implementations.

How can we benchmark language implementations?
We can't - we measure particular programs.


Fastest programs in each programming language

There are 4 sets of up-to-date measurements. Click one of these
color-code links to see one benchmark for a particular OS/machine -


23 Nov 2009

 Ubuntu™ : Intel® Q6600® quad-core 

23 Nov 2009

 x64 Ubuntu™ : Intel® Q6600® quad-core 

23 Nov 2009

 x64 Ubuntu™ : Intel® Q6600® one core 

23 Nov 2009

 Ubuntu™ : Intel® Q6600® one core 


Compare fastest programs - programming languages Z to A

Smalltalk VisualWorks uniform reflective environment - real live objects

Scheme PLT statically-scoped properly tail-recursive dialect of lisp

Scala higher-order type-safe programming for jvm

Ruby MRI programmer fun - everything is an object scripting

Ruby JRuby everything is an object scripting for jvm

Ruby 1.9 the new Ruby

Python CPython uncluttered imperative programming plus objects

Python 3 the new Python

PHP scripts embedded in html, and much more

Perl server-side shell & cgi scripts

Pascal Free Pascal imperative programming plus objects

OCaml modular type-safe strict functional programming plus objects

Mozart/Oz multi-multi-multi-paradigm distributed programming

Lua LuaJIT jit compiler fully compatible with lua 5.1

Lua associative arrays for extensible embedded scripting

Lisp SBCL pioneering s-expression oriented programming

Lisaac everything is a prototype object plus design by contract

JavaScript V8 web-browser embedded scripting

JavaScript TraceMonkey ubiquitous web-browser embedded scripting

Java 6 steady state approximate jvm steady state

Java 6 -Xint ubiquitous bytecode interpreter virtual machine

Java 6 -server ubiquitous jit server virtual machine

Haskell GHC lazy pure functional programming

Go 6g 8g types just are - Go is an experiment

Fortran Intel pioneering numeric and scientific programming

F# Mono higher-order type-safe programming (mono is not ms .net)

Erlang HiPE concurrent real-time distributed fault-tolerant software

Clean lazy & strict pure functional programming

C++ GNU g++ c plus objects plus generics

C# Mono oo plus functional style (mono is not ms .net)

GNU gcc unchecked low-level programming

ATS dependent types & linear types plus theorem proving

Ada 2005 GNAT large-scale safety-critical software

Revised BSD license