Run times for Hello, World in 2009

Someone recently asked what my issue was regarding the JVM, since at the moment it prevents me from falling too much in love with Clojure – a language with the double-benefits of functional programming, and Lisp syntax and macros.

Well, below is my reason. These may not seem like much time in the scheme of things, but psychologically it builds up on me when I have to run a particular script over and over and over again. I’ve already noticed the pain with Groovy.

Language Running time
C 0.00415675640106
C++ 0.0043337225914
Haskell (compiled) 0.00494946241379
Perl 0.00773874521255
Ruby (1.8.7) 0.00913717746735
Ruby (1.9.1-p0) 0.0196997523308
Python 0.0269904136658
ECL (Common Lisp) 0.126332080364
Java (JDK6) 0.146584188938
Haskell (interpreted) 0.20009740591
Groovy (JDK6) 1.07791568041

If you’d like to generate some of these timings for your own system, I have created a Hello, world project on GitHub.