From: Lars Christensen <larsch@...>
Date: 2002-05-06T16:15:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. Native trivia

On Sat, 4 May 2002, Sean Russell wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm reposting this, because I don't think it got propegated properly the
> first time.  I can't find the post on Google, anyway.
>
>
> I thought I'd post these results to the list, since you might find them
> interesting.  This really is unscientific trivia, so digest it as such.
>
> I've been playing with GCJ, the Java-to-native compiler.  I've got this
> little application called EDT that does some basic math and generates a
> decimal-based time from the current time.  I've written it in both Ruby and
> Java, and have been using it to get familiar with GCJ.  I did some timing
> tests, just to see how things behaved, and the results are more or less
> surprising.
>
> The important thing to note is that this is a VERY small app, so startup
> delays are disproportionately weighted.  However, this doesn't invalidate
> the tests; I have a number of little apps like this that I run multiple
> times daily, and the startup times do indeed impact the "user enjoyment"
> factor.
>
> These are from an average of five runs, using Linux's 'time'.  edt_java is
> pure java, using the 1.4 vm; edt is the ruby version, and EDT is the
> java-compiled-to-native version:
>
> TIMES (USER)
>   ./edt_java: 1.27
>   ./EDT: 0.14
>   edt: 0.11
> CPUS (%)
>   ./edt_java: 64.33
>   ./EDT: 56.33
>   edt: 74.67
> TOTALS (TIME)
>   ./edt_java: 2.22
>   ./EDT: 0.33
>   edt: 0.18

For a numerical-intensive program i'm getting QUITE a different result. I
took the "Sieve of Eratosthenes" Benchmark from The Great Computer
Language Shootout page ran an it with ruby, jdk-1.4 and gjc-3.0.4. Here
are the results:

# Ruby-1.6.7 (shared)

$ time ruby sieve.ruby 5000
Count: 1028

user    1m47.470s

# Ruby-1.7.2 (2002/05/06) (shared)

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. time ./ruby ~/bench/sieve.ruby 5000
Count: 1028

user    2m43.800s

# j2se-1.4

$ time java sieve 5000
Count: 1028

user    0m1.420s

# gcj-3.0.4

$ time ./sieve 5000
Count: 1028

user    0m2.440s

The Ruby Benchmark isn't all fair, because i'm using a dynamically linked
version of Ruby, which, by my benchmarks, are 30-40% slower than a
statically linked (Can anyone explain this?). It doesn't change the
conclusion though: Ruby is (more than relatively) slow for things like
this.

This on Intel Solaris 2.8.

-- 
Lars Christensen, larsch@cs.auc.dk