From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Oct 16 08:05:06 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id IAA04132 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 08:05:06 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers) Received: from mailsrv2.zib.de (mailsrv2.zib.de [130.73.121.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id IAA04115 for ; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 08:04:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from schneider@zib.de) Received: from soft13.zib.de by mailsrv2.zib.de (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id RAA26077; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 17:04:44 +0200 Received: by soft13.zib.de (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id RAA07624; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 17:04:44 +0200 Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 17:04:44 +0200 Message-Id: <199710161504.RAA07624@soft13.zib.de> From: Wolfram Schneider To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: FYI: Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/interps/pap.html Timing Trials, or, the Trials of Timing: Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages (10/13/97) Brian W. Kernighan Bell Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ 07974 bwk@bell-labs.com Christopher J. Van Wyk Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Drew University Madison, NJ 07940 cvanwyk@drew.edu ABSTRACT This paper describes some basic experiments to see how fast various popular scripting and user-interface languages run on a spectrum of representative tasks. We found enormous variation in performance, depending on many factors, some uncontrollable and even unknowable. There seems to be little hope of predicting performance other than in the most general way; if there is a single clear conclusion, it is that no benchmark result should ever be taken at face value. [...]