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...