E02: What is the FASTEST Computer Language - 45 Tested: Round Two! (E02)

Episode 02: To find the FASTEST computer language retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer takes you on a guided tour of 45 different computer languages and drag races each against one another using a prime sieve benchmark in this multi-episode series. From Ada to Zig and everything in between, find out which is fastest and which is slowest as languages are revealed and added to the leaderboard each episode.

What's the FASTEST Computer Language? In order to find out, Dave puts each language through its paces running a prime sieve crafted specially for this purpose uniquely in each language. 45 languages are tested in total, and this is Round 2 in the series.

Languages tested in the series include ARM ASM, X86 ASM, Ada, BASIC, Bash, C, C++, C#, D, Dart, Delphi, F#, Fortran, Go, Haskel, Java, Julia, Lisp, Lua, Node, Nim, OCaml, Octave, PHP, Pascal, Perl, Powershell, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, SQL, Swift, TypeScript, V, Zig, and more are being added!
Each round, languages are tested in groups, such as C vs C++ vs Rust, Python vs BASIC, Ada vs Pascal vs Delphi, and so on.

Episode List:

Footage of mob with pitchforks, etc:
APA. Whale, J. (1931). Frankenstein. Universal Pictures.

[lohphat]

I won’t be impressed until the Perl code is on a single line with no comments.

[IanJohnstonblog]

You always hit me right in the feels with the Friendly Giant outro.

Love this series, and find the comparisons of all the languages fascinating.

[Chzz]

Please show the "current" leaderboard of all previously raced languages.
I know that the videos are not really ordered but they DO have episode numbers after all :)

[lucyfrye]

Everybody knows French is the fastest language with Italian a close second. Ever hear a Frenchman speak slowly? Exactly!

[mikek]

Maybe group data analysis/science languages together, like Python, R, Julia, and Matlab

[connorm]

I think that C and Zig should be in the same episode since Zig is often called 'better C' by its community and creators

[Futt.Buckerson]

Love these videos. It's really cool to see someone with this much experience talking about programming

[Afif]

Python: print("Hello World")

Java: hey, would you mind to make some classes first? :)

[MichaelEhling]

9:33 "...raison d'être..." pronounced well. Canadian cred checks out.

[kdawg]

This is fascinating. I only have a few years of basic programming classes from 20 years ago notched on my belt, but it's enough to pick up the interesting differences by immersion here. I suspect by the time this series finishes, I may just have some inspiration to go try a few of these languages out and get back on that train.

[jeremiefaucher-goulet]

Seems like you're having more and more fun editing your videos with all those tricks and effects ;)

[dangenson]

"Who shot JR" now there's a reference that probably lost most of the audience under 40, well played

[PorscheRacer]

As a fellow Saskatchewan kid that started on a Magnavox Odyssey II and wrote my first stuff on a Coleco ADAM (with my mom), it's always sea-quall to me, haha. This is a fun series!

[AdrianBoyko]

Ah, the good old days of three TV channels! I grew up in Alberta but spent a lot of time visiting relatives in Prince Albert and Saskatoon.

[spikeevans]

perl is, in my opinion, a write-only-language. I have written perl that six months later I had no idea how it worked.

[polmarcetsarda]

Once my C++ changes are merged, you bet it's going to be on the top!

[steve_weinrich]

Interesting video, but a few observations:

1) Machine language and assembler are the same thing. Assembler assigns a mnemonic to each machine instruction. It is a one-to-one relationship. It is simply a way to code in "letters" rather than "numbers" and was invented for that exact reason. All other languages use a one-to-many relationship. A C statement like "++a;" could translate into an "LOAD, INC, STORE" operation (far from the only possible implementation).

2) In a compiled language, the specific compiler, version, and optimization capabilities (and settings) can have a huge effect on performance. Further, the specific instruction set of the target machine can also have a huge effect. In the old days when compilers were only available from the hardware suppliers, it was very common for the compiler to take advantage of specific instruction unique to the hardware. A very old example was that on the IBM 360, there were native BCD instructions! I can remember when PC chips did not come with floating point operations (Intel 286 and 386). There are currently machines (and video cards) that can be programmed to use vector operations over arrays. The "look ahead" and caching capabilities of various processors differ dramatically.

In an interpreted language, many comparisons are invalid because it is not the language that is being compared, but the implementation of the internal run-time library. A Perl implementation on one machine is not required to run identically to another machine, only to produce the same results. I remember using APL and the performance results of various operations were very different on different machines due to the differences in implementation.

The short version of this is that tests can yield different results using different hardware/software/settings. Any comparison is limited to a very precise and unvarying specification!


3) IBM 360 JCL has no mechanism for looping, computation, or any other programming task. It only has the ability to test the "return" value of the previous operation (EXEC). It is possible that these capabilities were added in later machines and/or OS's, but I have no experience with them.

Keep up the good work!

[aaron]

"I apologize in advance" Canadian confirmed xD

[TheJanhalsema]

I love this project, I massivly enjoyed working on the Zig version with ityonemo. I worked on the faithfull version, I hope to score high with that :-). I enjoy seeing other languages and people being passionate about them 😊

[piratk]

This may be over kill, but the target/host may actually influence the results