"Hello,

World execution time"—may not be the most meaningful of benchmarks, but it's pretty important when you are writing shell scripts / cron jobs / random commandline utilities. It also serves to compare the startup overhead of different execution environments. So I ran this benchmark for my own curiosity and I thought you might like the results.

Rules: the program should print "Hello, World!

" and exit cleanly;

no "benchmark modes" that would hinder real-world use of the language are allowed;

no -e allowed: each program should run from its own file (source, bytecode or machine language as it may be.)

I ran these on a fast, otherwise idle machine, doing 10 runs to warm it up, and then taking the median real time of 101 runs. (So yes, I like the median more than the mean, when measuring things.)



The choice of languages is arbitrary. C is compiled, Mono and Java are poor-man's-compiled, the rest is interpreted. As for Chicken, don't bother asking: there is but a 2ms difference between csi and csc -O4 -block. I would have included Clojure, as I find the language itself not without its merits, but the current implementation is 4 times slower than plain Java and skewed the graph badly ;-)

So that pretty much settles the question for me!

cheers, Tobia