Ok, I guess we are closing in on making a 7.6 release. This is the
current shootout benchmark status against some other similar languages.
Java PHP Perl Pike Python Ruby TCL
1: 3.60 12.56 4.91 0.63 4.59 9.40 Failed (ackermann)
2: 1.68 11.91 4.76 1.40 3.06 8.61 15.19 (ary3)
3: 2.89 12.13 6.37 1.55 4.46 7.00 11.63 (fibo)
4: 7.94 5.98 5.72 4.69 3.83 18.67 7.75 (hash)
5: 1.48 8.62 3.47 1.09 2.48 6.30 8.33 (heapsort)
6: 5.46 Missing 3.19 2.70 4.73 2.44 27.44 (lists)
7: 2.17 Missing 5.90 1.83 4.76 3.38 Missing (methcall)
8: 7.27 Failed 17.91 0.91 13.95 35.87 34.39 (nestedloop)
9: 3.61 Missing 12.99 3.37 5.99 6.16 Missing (objinst)
10: 1.81 5.80 2.23 1.43 2.92 5.93 5.87 (random)
11: 6.57 Failed 12.19 4.52 9.16 18.39 50.59 (sieve)
12: 3.12 4.50 2.32 1.90 4.21 3.80 7.02 (strcat)
I have altered the lists test to use arrays, as intended, and not
strings (which lowers the time from 13.1 seconds to 2.7). The languages
are gcj/gij 2.3 (the compilation time is included), PHP 4.3.4RC3, Perl
5.8.2, Pike 7.5.13, Python 2.3.2, Ruby 1.8.0 and TCL 8.3. In the year
since last benchmark we can see some significant improvements in the
Python performance, almost 50% in many tests (though it is still not
possible to run ackermann(3,9) without running out of stack). Perl is
also doing good with about 25% better since 5.8.0. From test 8 we can
see that multipass strength reduction isn't implemented in any other
language. On the whole it looks like Perl and Python is now only twice
as slow as Pike, so we better watch out...