Computer Language Comparison

Guillaume Marceau has used data from the Computer Language Benchmark Game to provide a graphical comparison of many different languages.

If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose languages would cluster at the top left. Let’s call them system languages. The elegantly concise but sluggish languages would cluster at the bottom right. Let’s call them script languages. On the top right you would find the obsolete languages. That is, languages which have since been outclassed by newer languages, unless they offer some quirky attraction that is not captured by the data here. And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use.

Of course the C compilers do a very good job on performance, but seem to do average on verbosity (better than I expected). Haskell (ghc) does a surprisingly nice job. I wish that I’d thought to do this kind of visualization, it’s really pretty neat. The only improvement that I could think of, would be to do the performance axis on a logarithmic scale.