45 Computer Languages Compared: Which is FASTEST?

Episode 01: Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer takes you on a guided tour of 45 different computer languages and drag races each against one another using a prime sieve benchmark. From Ada to Zig and everything in between, find out which is fastest and which is slowest.
Languages tested in the series include ARM ASM, X86 ASM, Ada, BASIC, Bash, C, C++, C#, D, Dart, Delphi, F#, Fortran, Go, Haskel, Java, Julia, Lisp, Lua, Node, Nim, OCaml, Octave, PHP, Pascal, Perl, Powershell, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, SQL, Swift, TypeScript, V, Zig, and more are being added!
Each round, languages are tested in groups, such as C vs C++ vs Rust, Python vs BASIC, Ada vs Pascal vs Delphi, and so on. Thus you can expect 3-5 languages typical per episode in order to keep the length manageable while still spending 3-5 minutes looking at each language.
If you are a great optimizer in ANY language, please consider contributing to our project! We could very much use specialized help with the application of SSE/AVX/SIMD instructions in the Intel assembler implementations, for example. Or perhaps you're smart enough to use the __lzcnt() intrinsic in your sieve, rendering the C faster than the assembly? But it won't happen unless you show us how it's done - literally!
The higher performance languages are very competitive with one another also, so if you think you can improve one of the algorithms, please take a shot at it!
We would also like to see more languages introduced to the project. Not imaginary languages you made up in Yacc or Bison, but real languages that we just don't have yet! Are there no old programmers left that remember Job Control Language? Can you even write a sieve in JCL? Well, if you can, we don't have one yet!
Github Code: github.com/PlummersSoftwareLL...

[@DavesGarage]

NEWS ALERT: The current winners are NOT C, C#, C++, or Assembly. If you think it should be, you'll have to join the GitHub project and make it so, because right now other more modern languages are in the lead!

[@billowen3285]

Someone is programming assembly badly if it's not winning

[@valdisblack1541]

@@billowen3285 that's obvious! every language is the ASM code at the end.

[@jackgerberuae]

@@billowen3285 the programmer made a note in the code stating that a procedure can be optimised by using bit shifting which would make it faster. He just did not bother to, so it’s up to next guy to pick up the cudgels. I only have reporting and not the requisite assembly skills, unfortunately…🥵

[@kamurashev]

that's shocking, makes me curious as hell.

[@DavesGarage]

@@billowen3285 You can't call code bad unless you can improve on it!

[@DwayneSmith1965]

Obviously SQL will win, you just have to have the correct index into the table I prepared earlier :)

[@judewestburner]

Whatever the question is, the answer is SQL

[@kittysreview9055]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@DavesGarage]

The irony is that a lookup table wouldn't really help much. What you need is a "distance to next prime", that's the unknown and hard part. Otherwise the question is figuring out which numbers were worth looking up (ie: were prime).

[@EwanMarshall]

@@DavesGarage Well, you could pre-calculate the entire sieve and just have a table of: 0, 2 1,3 2,5 ... But yeah, that would fall afoul of the rules for good reason :D Could also try to obfuscate it by making the indexes for the primes some easy to calculate sequence and fill in the rest with random numbers.

[@thebuccaneersden]

@@judewestburner Q: "Who is truly behind 9/11?" A: "SQL" I knew it!!!

[@tompov227]

"Americans call him by value and Europeans call him by name..... well if you've got a better Pascal joke Id love to hear it" Amazing how the first joke (by value vs. by name) is funny but its even funnier when he follows it up with that

[@delberry8777]

Like your videos. Makes me feel like I'm back in the 90s when I was excited about things like programming languages etc. I'm still a software dev but now I rarely get passed annoyance about new languages, frameworks, build tools etc.

[@DavesGarage]

That's awesome!

[@DavesGarage]

Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss gold like this trailer :-)

[@vinay866]

I guess its C or assembly

[@moffix]

Cannot wait for the next head-to-head. Appreciate the way you you broke down Pascal and Ada. Was in college in the late 80s and coded in both. We even had defense department grant for Ada development. Unfortunately ended up doing C and Cobol after college.

[@skf957]

Dave, your channel just improved by some order of magnitude. And it was already pretty good. Thanks for this, looking forward to the next one.

[@PixelsWorkshopVideos]

I love it!!! Gives a tremendous insight on the conditions and deployment characteristics of every specific language.

[@RvnKnight]

You brought me down nostalgia lane today as I haven't really used Pascal in over two decades. Pascal is the first compiled language I ever used.

[@jackgerberuae]

Ditto, but more than 30years for me.

[@RvnKnight]

@@jackgerberuae Just under 30 for me. I learned it at 14/15 and I'll be 40 soon.

[@khoibut6206]

I am 16 currently and I learnt Pascal when I was 13

[@jackgerberuae]

@@khoibut6206 good for you. Pascal was so easy and clear. At the time it was competing with C, C+ and later Turbo Pascal and C++. Proper C+ became too complicated very quickly I started with Python 3 years ago, after a very long time not coding anything. It was easy, and it builds on what we knew from Pascal. Anyways, my silly stories… good luck. Pascal is cool

[@nahuelcutrera]

me too here.

[@rootbeer666]

Awesome intro, Dave! You're a great showman. As someone who took a similar computer languages course in college I really appreciate the series and look forward to the upcoming videos. 👍

[@Ranchhand323]

Your out takes are the best Dave. They always make me smirk or chuckle. I hope everyone sticks around the whole play to enjoy the full experience.

[@joejoesoft]

FYI: Delphi has a free Community Edition. This used to be called the "Starter" edition and cost 200 bucks. About 3 years ago, they renamed it and removed the price tag. For non-commercial use, it's free indefinitely. For commercial use, it's limited to 5 devs and under 5K revenue per year.

[@DavesGarage]

I would LOVE it if you could join the project and make the Delphi code we already have work with it in such a way that everyone could run it and we not violate any licenses! I don't know if this meets their def of non-commercial though since I AM incorporated and make more than 5K a year... just not with Delphi :-)

[@joejoesoft]

@@DavesGarage So, after a couple of hours of research, I don't think I could add anything helpful to the project via Delphi (a platform I've used for 20 years). I can only confirm you're correct; the licensing would still be an issue. Radstudio (official) has Docker images, but the licensing would be the hard part. When the license for Community Edition is for a business, you'd not be eligible. The license states, "regardless of whether the Community Edition is used solely to write applications for the business' internal use or is seen by third parties outside the company or has a direct revenue associated with it" as a disqualification for the over 5K a year revenue. There is a GPL option: Lazarus. It's "Delphi compatible", but this wouldn't be testing Delphi itself. I don't think this would be a suitable replacement in the spirit of your project.

[@justsomeperson5110]

LOL I just recently stumbled across your channel and already found my way to this video and I have to say, I absolutely love this idea, in part for its implementation. Because a lot of times the "fastest" language is not so much which language is actually faster, but which implementation of a function is the most optimized. And this race covers both concepts well! Kudos to everyone involved and contributing! As an old timer who has worked in waaaaaaaaay too many different languages (computer and human) over the years, I love seeing this!

[@excitedbox5705]

would have been nice to include a list of the results for those who don't have the time to set this up.

[@adarshyadav253]

Exactly

[@Mpivovitz]

*SOUP NAZI VOICE* no results for you!

[@yummybeers]

As it’s said, there are NO coincidences. Anyone else notice that Forth was left out here? I think we know why.

[@DavesGarage]

Shh... I do NOT need the FORTH and ALGOL goons coming around my lab again, roughing me up, saying "It'd be a shame if something happened to your IEEE math routines".

[@charlesbass6324]

@@DavesGarage Yes, I'd really like to see something regarding Forth also.

[@TurboGoth]

@@charlesbass6324 I think i know what Dave is having a hard time holding his tongue on with this one. My psychic powers hear him screaming, "THEN BY ALL MEANS ADD IT!!!...." and then "no, no - Don't say it, take a breath", he tells himself. =)

[@charlesbass6324]

@@TurboGoth I believe we ALL (that know) know the answer to this one. A Forth definition drops right into assembler and executes. It's damn small and fast. Dave?! You listening ??? Look, I'll buy on of your coffee mugs if you just run the tests, okay?

[@PhillipEaton]

Forth could certainly challenge, if someone could be bothered optimising their compiler appropriately in the process. And yes, you ARE allowed to do that in Forth, encouraged in fact!

[@johanrg70]

Great video, got me hooked for the next one :) Assembly is potentially the fastest but it comes down to the implementation of the programmer, more so than the other languages.

[@johanrg70]

@jshowa o No, but similar implementations in other languages can result in bigger speed difference where the language itself is the limiting factor.

[@johanrg70]

@jshowa o My point here was only that to beat something like c++ when both are highly optimized is going to require more effort but it's theoretically possible with assembly. In certain other languages, it's the language itself that is the limiting factor.

[@walterpark8824]

I enjoy your posts, and this is a good one. But I've got to focus on the amazing fort four minutes or so. It's always fun to see a smart, knowledgeable, and articulate (now there's a combination!) guy discuss tech, but the true genius of your story is the internet itself. Thank you, Tim Berners-Lee and w3! To have such volunteer resources come together so effectively and efficiently will never cease to amaze me. I'm happy to put up with a million cat videos to have access to a few collaborations like this one.

[@arturkovacs3689]

2 hours after the "premier", it's still only available in 360p in Northen Europe. Not sure if this is normal. This is merely a friendly heads up.

[@johannesbohm6458]

At least it tells you the truth. On my device it says "1080 (auto)" and If I want to Change it it says "quality Options Not available" but its clearly 360p.

[@DavesGarage]

I know, I think something is borked with KZbin on this one. After 12 hours, I tried editing the video and trimming a second out to see if that will "reset" it. I also uploaded an HD version alongside, but hate doing that. Frustrating!

[@kilrahvp]

Still same after 6... I was actually playing with old VHS tapes and a small CRT TV, so I guess it's fitting that YT only gives me 360p. Had fun transferring the video to tape and watching it there as a nod :D

[@HomelabExtreme]

Still the same here in Denmark :(

[@Dr_Dude]

@@DavesGarage same in US, Utah.

[@FlaviusFernandes]

You cannot do a drag race without engineers from other languages involved.

[@MRCAGR1]

The Ada was using 64 bits whereas the Pascal was 32 bits. What processor were they running on, 32 or 64 bit architecture, single core or multi core? What level of optimisation? Which compilers were used?

Probably more importantly, Ada was using packed bits while Delphi was using one bit per byte. The latter is much faster on most processors, including the one used here, but uses eight times as much RAM.

[@notenoughmonkeys]

Nice video, look forward to seeing where this goes. In terms of Ada vs Pascal, in all honesty, whilst you *can* get Ada closer in terms of performance, alot of this would be achieved going against the spirit of what Ada is supposed to provide, as much of the time will be won/lost with Ada's extensive use of run-time assertions / range checks etc. which is why it would be selected as a language in the first place, as well as, as you rightly mentioned, the fact so many errors are pushed to the compilation phase compared to other languages. I have noticed that the latest commits have tweaked the compilation settings to disable run time checks etc., which is fine, it will show that Ada can close the gap if you absolutely have to, and certainly some projects I've worked on did exactly this to meet throughput needs (effectively treating the run-time checks more like debug asserts in C/C++, i.e. with an end goal of releasing with all these being suppressed by the compiler), but typically, the expectation is that these remain active, and appropriate exception handling will keep things working as intended, otherwise you lose one of the main benefits of the language. In terms of esoteric languages, I can chip in with DCL (targeted at the old VAXs) if I get some free time. Good luck running it though... 😀

[@jeffreyphipps1507]

I wondered how he was going to get 45 languages compared in 22 minutes!

[@DavesGarage]

I figure I should be able to get 4-5 languages in a normal episode where I don't have to explain the entire setup each time!

[@justinl.7401]

Great presentation and I'm looking forward to the rest of the series :) Sidenote: If the mic you're using is the Rode Procaster, the manual says it's supposed to be

[@ErraticPT]

Always had a soft spot for pascal, probably because I used Turbo Pascal on my college course and Hispeed Pascal at home, the later was basically a clone of TP for the Atari ST. Meant I could do most of my course work at home at night, bring it in to college during the day and it would run with zero changes. Met the programmers of Hispeed Pascal at a few computer shows (company called Hi-soft, famous for Devpac disassemblers and other dev tools for the ST and Amiga) and even pointed out a few bugs, ended up with them regularly sending me non public beta versions regularly. This was before the Internet proper so it was all done via letters and packages stuffed with floppy disks!

[@paulmoffat9306]

I have the Reverse Assembler tool that could 'translate' compiled 8080/z80 programs into Assembler. That program was called 'REVAS'. Incidentally, that name was used in S1E1 of Max Headroom. I disassembled the CP/M 2.2 OS to Assembler and re-compiled it - worked fine! FYI- still have it.

[@hadireg]

great episode Dave!

[@SubCodeX]

This brings back sooo many childhood memories... Started out on my Cyrix "386-ish" with Borland Turbo Pascal 7.0... Hitting mode 13 with interupt 10 (or was it the other way around?) and doing graphics like there was no tomorrow.. =P Yes, yes.. the inline ASM support was awesome! =)

[@wisenber]

This had better be worth the manhunt and the carjacking!I only had three weeks left before I got out.

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

He said break out not go on a rampage. Lol

[@le9038]

One question about this race, did you run the programs in high priority? In the task manager (or system monitor) you can tell the system to put programs at a higher priority to make them run faster. This is best for video games and programs calculating things as fast as possible. Just wondering doe. Because that might effect performance.

[@berndeckenfels]

Overflow detection at Compilation time… except when you fly an Ariane 5 (V88) and skip it

[@fabiosemino2214]

I knew about the software error ported from Ariane 4, was it an ada program?

[@berndeckenfels]

@@fabiosemino2214 es, thats my understanding. The overflow condition was actually flagged by the compiler, but it had been Sessel and accepted for Ariane 4 as would not happen. For 5 it could happen, was triggered and worst of all, in code which was not used after launch.

[@KryptKicker5]

I still use Pascal. Currently using it for a project. It’s my favorite language. I also really admire Niklaus Wirth. I feel better now that I’ve publicly admitted it :)

[@stevenbliss989]

Which Pascal?

[@KryptKicker5]

@@stevenbliss989 Lazarus + FPC. I used to use Delphi but it took so long for 64 bit, Unicode and Linux that I moved on. And the ridiculously high price cemented my feelings. The LCL is still not nearly as slick as the VCL but it’s cross platform and pretty impressive in its own right. FPC has always been awesome but Lazarus and the LCL have really matured a lot through the years. Personally I probably wouldn’t go back to Delphi. I’m happy with it and the community seems enthusiastic.

[@stevenbliss989]

​@@KryptKicker5 Cool. Borland did fuck up Delphi after the great Product it started out being, when they went insane with crap like Inprise etc. Lately (in versions 10.4.2+) they took away floating form design - INSANITY! So where I work were will stay on 10.3.3 forever, and stopped paying for update subscriptions - until they fix this, ...likely never! Maybe in 10 years they might be where they should have been ten years ago, ...very sad! :)

[@KryptKicker5]

@@stevenbliss989 That's just crazy. I can believe it though. This topic came up for me not just a few days ago. To be fair, Lazarus doesn't have the best alternative. It's got a couple of docking managers, with the older more restrictive type being the go to. I haven't dealt with it but I've seen a number of forum posts about it. Seems that if you want anything resembling Delphi's older functionality you're expected to RYO. There's even an incomplete tutorial to follow :P

[@pimpthyride]

We love you KryptKicker5.

[@MsHojat]

I'm not suggesting Autohotkey/AutoIt is fast or do well in this (I'd imagine it would do even worse than Python), but since you mentioned the languages you used in this video, it sounds like you've never used these? They are windows-specific languages used to automate all sorts of simple/small (or larger) tasks quickly as well as change/set hotkeys. It's really useful. What kind of stuff do you use instead for that? only powershell? The little bit of dabbling in Python perhaps? Or would you you use C++/C#?

[@Roy-K]

Loved the little LED display doing the EQ of his audio instead of the usual fire effect

[@jackgerberuae]

The assembly code is not yet optimized. It has a comment stating a critical procedure can be made faster. So there is uplift for the right skilled programmer to try.

[@DavesGarage]

You bet. But unless and until a human does so, assembly language is slower, because assembly language is dependent on human authors.

[@bradmoore3433]

Great stuff!

[@slycordinator]

If we include testing shell languages, some of the difference you get could be from which equivalent shell program you run. If I were to change the existing bash one to be posix compliant to run on any "/bin/sh", you could end up with differing results if sh is dash, busybox, bash, the ones included with the various BSD's, and others. They'd probably behave similarly, but I know that dash is generally faster than bash for regular sh scripts.

[@houstonfirefox]

I always liked Borland Delphi which was a successor to Turbo Pascal. One of my first jobs at Compaq involved sitting there for a week with an empty desk then one day a shrink-wrapped boxed set of Borland Delphi 1.0 showed up on my desk. I tell my manager that I have no experience programming in this language - he said "welcome to the club, nobody else does either". Literally, there was no training around for it and I had never programmed in Pascal. Ended up writing an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) system in it that they used until HP bought them out. A plus is that Delphi is the only language I know of that was Compiled in Itself! The source code was actually part of the installation so any bugs in the language could be fixed. Ah, the good old days!

[@VioletGiraffe]

So early to the video, only 360p is available! Good job, KZbin.

[@valdisblack1541]

we are 360p elite

[@ikannunaplays]

BASIC and Pascal are the first languages I learned in school. Interesting to see how it turned out in the race. Also glad to see because I haven't coded in it it since.

[@iulianalinsbengheci5438]

same here Visual Basic and Pascal 2005 I last coded in them .... nostalgia

[@gregsb3454]

Cheers Dave, You have caused a major dust problem at my house, when you mentioned all the obtuse programming languages, that some how managed to move all the dust covering them in my brain. Great series

[@joshuablanton3016]

"Recreationally fluent" is an excellent description of a programming language familiarity. I love that!

[@TheSilent333]

Turbo Pascal is the reason I'm a programmer today. Great video as always!

[@enc4p]

Now KZbin doesn't even show quality option when clicking 3 dots on mobile

[@CnfuD-Choticstreaming]

A video on how this effort was organised and on it's technical aspect, aka how you ended up automating everything down to a single make.

[@Phantom_Aspekt]

I've recently decided to try and learn a programming language and thought that Lisp would be an interesting place to start, I then seen this and got curious about what the results were and found Lisp sitting in second place behind C++, seems Lisp is super underrated

[@IanSlothieRolfe]

I always had a soft spot for Delphi, it was one of the first packages to make developing Windows programs easy (except perhaps for Visual Basic but that's another story!). At the time I was also using OpenROAD (formally Ingres Windows4GL) and it had many similarities in its general object-oriented nature. I think Delphi was one of the few languages I developed GUI based programs for recreationally.

[@dannoringer]

Fun. I'm an old Pascal coder, and love that language. Makes me a little sad that it's score is so bad compared to the highest performer, but with computers as fast as they are Pascal will always meet my needs. (If I can find a modern Pascal compiler....good luck with that)

[@beaconofwierd1883]

I was expecting a neat bar graph of all the languages where you could clearly see clusters based on language type :(

[@pst659]

same his videos are not that good.

[@AlFredo-sx2yy]

@@pst659 besides the comparisons are unfair because the code used for some of the languages are just absurdly terribly written. Almost as if the objective was to intentionally slow down some languages when you can very easily write a program that is hundreds of times faster lol... this channel has decayed over time tbh.

[@myentertainment55]

Me after watching first episode: Hm, it would be interesting how java is going to perform in that test. Dave: NEW VIDEO with 45 languages! Just Wow :D

[@AndrewKelley]

I'm curious to see how the ARM asm and x86 asm are tested against each other, with respect to keeping the hardware the same.

[@officialstrike]

Definitely, it's the implementation that matters, not the language!

[@jongseokpark1235]

I mean we all know every language is just machine code with extra steps... Wouldn't this just depend on how optimized the compiler/interpreter is for the given ISA/microarchitecture? (Unless your using Verilog for a FPGA or something)

[@wintercoder6687]

If the algorithm is optimized to the language, the fastest is going to be assembly/machine code... simply because any language at a higher level (which would be all of them) get compiled down to assembly/machine code for execution. Plus other factors such a processor speed, etc., play a role. How will this be measured? Time? Number of execution clock cycles? Not all clock cycles are created equal. How do you compare ARM vs x86? (In terms of performance, since the typical platform for each is vastly different.) Now... if you are comparing features/functions/usage... well.. that's all subjective.

[@mtheos]

A garbage collected language that's allocating and deallocating will be slower than one that isn't, and an interpreted language (including VM languages which compile to intermediate code) will be influenced by how well their VM is optimised for the instructions being executed or how well the compiler can substitute commands for more efficient ones (like using AVX512 instructions). Sometimes a language just isn't meant to be fast. Take Bash for example, it was made to be a command language (shell) for unix. Most of what it does is call other programs and pipe their inputs/outputs together or redirect their input/output from/to a file. There's no reason to optimise it as a scripting language because anything that should be optimised should be a program it can call.

[@TurboGoth]

I think you've sorta got a good point but consider how the performance of this particular algorithm is considered as representative of the speed of a language. Just one algorithm was chosen. And likewise, just one compiler or architecture is being chosen as representative of what that language can do. But languages don't determine performance and we all know that: tooling does. And so since we can't use all possible tooling to determine language speed, we need to pick one and consider it representative. But still, I think mainstream tooling and architectures make for as representative numbers as we can get. I mean, let's say you have a bizarre fluke of a machine and a wacky compiler/linker that just kills on your particular hardware? Who cares? What would you best numbers ever really say to the rest of the world? We just need to go with mainstream here. It does represent the most relevant criteria: the real world.

[@jongseokpark1235]

@@TurboGoth Yeah I see the point of the video is comparing performances in mainstream environments but I just wanted to mention that performance differences depend more heavily on how much the final machine code exploit the underlying hardware (threads, cache optimization, blocking, SIMD, prefeching, etc.) So if a compiler engineer from Intel can write a C code which is 100 times faster than what I could in Rust or CUDA/nvcc could genrate codes which are way faster than OpenCL its because they have deeper (often proprietary) knowledge about the hardware not because of the language itself.

[@TurboGoth]

@@jongseokpark1235 the hardware parallelism that may be applied to any given algorithm is very relevant to this discussion. Certainly if this problem lended itself to what could be done well in CUDA/OpenCL/Vulkan using a graphics card then C would win very unfairly because calling these APIs is always most readily available as an option from C. And while something can be said for C for it's easy use of system libraries without gobs of intermediate glue code, it certainly doesn't mean it's a faster language because of it.

[@bruker2211]

When the upper limit (1000000) is defined as an constant literal directly in the source code, some languages can take advantage of this and find the prime numbers in compiletime (meta programming)

[@manojbajaj95]

Exactly. C++ solution "attempts" to calculate sqrt in compile time, why not just check if it is prime or not.

[@neginjavaheri2149]

Great Content.

[@TurboGoth]

I can appreciate the efficiency argument for the most productive languages: optimize in terms of minimizing the cost on the most expensive resources: the programmers. =)

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

That is exactly what high level languages do. Sure it's possible to use a lower level language to write your user interface so it takes a thousandth of a second less time to render, but if you have to pay your program for 10 times as much to do it, did you really save anything?

[@TurboGoth]

@@WarrenGarabrandt then there's the discussion on the real math of how much time is saved with efficiency. If 1 second is saved then that's 1 second and so what? But if it is 1 second saved by each run of the program EVER then you need to multiply that second by how many times it is run. And by jow many people? And in how tight of a loop that is needed to run quickly in order to maintain smooth animation in a game?

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

@@TurboGoth well yes and no. If the time saved is small enough, people probably won't even notice it. Besides, the slowest part about any computer is almost always the person using it. Writers take about the same amount of time to write a book on a typewriter as they do a modern high end computer. This is because the bottleneck isn't how fast they can type, for the most part. Whether it takes Microsoft word 2 seconds to open for 15 seconds to open hardly matters if the writer is going to spend eight hours in the program and only write maybe one chapter of text at most. There are always cases where performance is absolutely critical and you have to write the code as efficiently as possible. You're not going to find interpreted languages and rapid application development packages used for this kind of performance critical code. The vast majority of software that is written on a daily basis is hardly what anyone would consider to be performance critical. On that note, nobody is choosing their line of business software or any program for that matter based on whether or not it's one second faster at any one operation. People buy Adobe products not because they're the fastest on the planet, but rather because of the ecosystem and the support. People use Windows not because it's the most efficient operating system, but rather because the ecosystem and the support. Sure Microsoft could spend a bunch of time making it where the start menu opens more quickly. They could also prioritize local file searches over web searches, which is what most people (I think) are going to use the start menu for anyways. They don't do that because that's not how they make their money. The simple fact is computers are so fast today that we can afford for almost all of the programs we use to be a little inefficient and it makes hardly any difference. To people like myself (and I expect probably you too) that is appalling, and I believe all of the critical software that I use should be written to be as efficient as possible. But taking a quick inventory of the programs I use the most, and not one of them are written in Assembly language. Most are written in high level interpreted languages actually, and they work just fine.

[@sebastianmestre8971]

@@WarrenGarabrandt When I'm coding, I like to close my editor while I compile or test my program. A low resource machine might not be able to run two heavy GUI apps smoothly at the same time, so closing one to open the other is necessary for some users. These workflows are very unergonomic if startup time is too large. Also, if an app launches very quickly, I might be able to use it programatically (e.g. in an AHK script) In general, fast things open up use cases that one might not even consider for slower pieces of software. It's not a matter of 'it does what I use it for quickly enough', but of 'what could I do with it if it was 10x or 100x faster?' I know for a fact that performance is something Adobe engineers take very seriously. I remember watching a talk by an engineer at Adobe where he talks about how user perception of a feature changes depending on speed, and how they aim to make every feature fast enough so that their users can comfortably incorporate them into their workflow.

[@SimGunther]

Second most expensive: the tool (not the language)

[@TylerLasagna]

Love the shirt Dave!

[@Allan_son]

It strikes me that this is not merely a test of languages. It is also a test of language implementations. I have worked in a place with foot-to-the-floor computing for 30 years. In the early days of Fortran and then C, I was involved in assessing compilers and we could easily see factors of 2 or 3 times between the same code on the same machine with different compilers. Other teams do those assessments today, but I cannot believe that conclusions from one implementation of a language can now be blindly applied to another. I could also quibble about using bit operations as an assessment of languages that nobody would select for bit operations. For example I have used perl for decades for text manipulation but bit manipulation never played a serious role in production code; if bit manipulation is non-trivial part of a task then invest the effort to move it from perl to something like C.

[@charlesbass6324]

I do hope that Forth is also in this comparison of languages.

[@remlatzargonix1329]

Regarding the "fastest" computer language: I think that would depend upon the task(s) you are trying to accomplish. Some languages might be extremely fsst when it comes to array manipulation whereas others might be more efficient at looping and so on.

[@ilektrokioydio]

Wow that intro was so cool!

[@thebuccaneersden]

​ @Dave's Garage I think the benchmark for SQL is going to be interesting, because, while SQL is a programming language, there are so many different implementations. As far as I can see in your GH repo, only MariaDB has been represented. I would argue that we should include more databases and see how they compare against each other. :)

[@paulwratt]

I know this is a bit dated now (6 months), and I did watch when the series as it came out, and I was going to comment but I (seriously) thought someone else would make this observation anyway - well 544 comments and still not - the only issue I have with it, is the recored timing procedure. Anyone who has done alot of cross-platform and/or cross-compiler work, is that the "text to screen" routines vary hugely, even with the same compiler of different platforms with the same CPU architecture. IE a lot of time can be lost in this routine. EG pipe output to file to see an example of just how much (with BASH its upto 100x faster). - Apart from that, I am glad someone finally took a stab at this sort of "drag race" speed test - thanks alot

[@tomooo2637]

Thank you for your time working though this. Your tests are primarily bit and integer manipulations and it would be good if you could run though a floating point computational analysis, in some cases using libraries (like numpy in python) Normally a bespoke algorithm is usually much faster than built in generic libraries (Java I mean you). (Yes, I know you cannot write anything close to numpy in native python - that would be insane). My work is mostly scientific, designing ML algorithms from first principle, 3D molecular graphics (ie GL + matrix multiplication) FFT, N-dimensional refinement - both LS and Maximum likelihood - so I generally stick to C for outright performance though I started with F66/F77 a long time ago. I have reproduced very C like java cos of working requirements, and at the moment I am stuck reluctantly in javascript preparing rendering engine data for GPU's which is for utterly horrible. Even taking out class instance instantiations in javascript produced a doubling of performance (for interactive calculations) when working on 3D collision and boundary analysis for 3D rendering which is complicated maths. (Yes I know that GL shader-engine does this, but not in the way users wanted). So, could you do a review of computational analysis (floating point complex calculations) in these languages too as I would really like to find out your view/finding on this.

[@notreallyme425]

18:01 I went to school at one of the academies and studied comp sci and thus coded A LOT in Ada. At first I hated it. It made you be a very disciplined programmer and plan everything out. But once it compiled your were often done with the assignment and got an ‘A.’ I’d spend 3 days coding and less than an hour debugging. Then we learned C++ and I loved it. Until I realized I spent 3 hours coding and 3 days debugging and never really got it to work (thus no ‘A’ grades). I really miss Ada! Is it still used?

[@dillbourne]

Currently have this running on a WSL2 install of ubuntu. Props to the developers for making this work even on a platform with some odd dependencies. Namely docker, which isn't running natively on Ubuntu, but rather on Windows and using the WSL2 compatibility layer.

[@Mythtician]

Thanks dave, you remind me a lot of mad before alcohol took over. Just wondering, Were you on a bowling team in illinois?

[@russellanderson2418]

Started in machine, assembler in 1979. The main frame computer was wire wrap wiring and pushbutton bootstrapping. I currently code in C#

[@thomas.alexander.]

Where is the leaderboard posted? Even to see a snapshot on a particular date?

[@rjones6219]

Reminds me of the marketing ploy of RISC computing. Back in the mid 80s, there was a push to introduce RISC computers, because customers had become transfixed on MIP rates, for comparing machine performance.

[@fromscratch2654]

Did anyone else get interruptions in the video which showed dave plummers right eye in closeup? But when you repeat it is not there anymore.

[@stevenalexwyant2]

yea me

[@popolony2k]

Very cool...but please add the specifications about compilers used on this test (both for Pascal and Ada). If you're using Turbo Pascal prior to 7.0 (maybe even 7.0), this compiler is strongly based on runtime which means that each test is a CALL to a generic comparison routine in runtime library. For example (I'll try to use a pseudo ASM code Z80): IF( number > 10) Then { LD DE, (number) LD HL, 10 CALL comparision_routine_address_at_runtime DJNZ else_statement_address } DoSomething; ELSE DoSomethingElse; So all branch test routines for all statements (IF THEN ELSE, REPEAT UNTIL, WHILE DO) were not inline on older Pascal compilers, so Pascal results could be better depending on compiler version used on your test; About Ada...I'm a huge fan of this language. Regards PopolonY2k

[@mushkamusic]

Hey Dave, the youtube algo brought me here and..well...it was right. Love this stuff :P subbed!

[@Mark.Brindle]

It's not really about 'language', it's more comparing compiler and optimizer output. E.g., Turbo Pascal and Delphi generate native assembler (except for the Delphi Borland released for .Net V1.1), while UCSD Pascal generates byte code which is interpreted. MS Pascal in the 80s was a dog and was killed by Turbo Pascal. C# will be slow on the first pass as the IL (byte code) is jittered and optimized to native code, then there is the server or workstation versions of the Garbage Collector. It's interesting to compare high level language features as I have always wanted more languages on .Net (as MS promised when it was released) allowing for a mix of languages in a application leveraging the best of each (Prolog as a rules engine, or APL for doing the financial heavy lifting). Someone did a Forth on .Net in the early days which was pretty awesome. Performance will come down to the compiler and optimizer being used and how good they are.

[@TurboGoth]

Good point about C#. While the first pass is still just one pass out of the millions that this task requires, the jit-hit should be negligible. The important piece of that puzzle would be the tradeoff in jit implementations where producing optimized code is far behind just creating working code ASAP and so the jit tradeoff should really show up blindingly. This would be one of those places where the mainly theoretical hotspot detection logic could pay in dividends where critical spots could be identified as such and then given a shot by a much more optimizing jit that may take its sweet time to produce excellent code.

[@MGSncB]

​@@TurboGoth .NET Core 2.x included Tiered Compilation (it was disabled by default then, 3.x+ enabled it out of the box) where the JIT compiler emitted code with little to no optimizations in Tier 0. Hot methods are being optimized in Tier 1. They've made a ton of progress on that one in .NET 5, and the Tier 1 code can sometimes be a lot faster than no-tiered full JIT, even with MethodImpl.AggressiveOptimization - the runtime actually guides the JIT and tells it where to fold, hoist and replace. There's also a separate "Quick JIT" toggle for loops.

UCSD Pascal generates bytecode for a virtual machine. You know, like Java?

[@Mark.Brindle]

@@TurboGoth I agree. The Benchmark library for .Net Core separates out the jitter time. It's a minimal time in many applications, although a compiled application foes not require it. The GC overhead would be interesting for each version. A good book back in V1.0 days was ".Net Performance". It's all changed now.

[@Mark.Brindle]

@ yes, I know and performed like a dog. I have no idea how they could justify the cost of it when I used it back in 1984.

[@mc-not_escher]

Sounds like a good challenge to the folks on codegolf

[@cliff8675]

Back in college I was thrown a languages class and we picked up an Ada compiler for our last project. I was thrown to the wolves and ended up almost line for line translating my Pascal code in about a week. Ahh the good ol' days. I remember teh complier taking about a half hour to compile the smallish file and that was if there were no errors. Thanks to Ada, I learned to batch jobs on a VAX rather quickly.

[@GRBtutorials]

0:23 But what if C, Rust and assembly are your favorites?

[@RetroTechChris]

Ah, Ada! I worked with it extensively about 10 or 15 years ago. We switched from AdaMulti to GNAT and got about a 99% speedup in build time, I'm not even kidding! I'm guessing that Ada was probably much slower due to runtime checks being enabled. And... of course, as noted, typing was strong, so what did people do from time to time? Use unchecked conversions, which defeated the purpose of it!!

[@Ranoake]

I hope each iteration of finding all the primes is much less than 5 minutes, or the rounding errors would be huge.

[@manojbajaj95]

Can somebody explain me whats the point of running it multithreaded if all sieves are ran independent of each other? Fyi, Have only read C++ solution.

[@mage1over137]

So did y'all use Numba, Numpy, and Dask for python?

[@izzieb]

If you can program in many different languages, does that make you a polyglot?

[@richardwehe7325]

I watched the video, but from my experience back in the old days, my answer is that nobody touches a good assembly language programmer on a PDP-11. The machine had a 16 bit address space, with larger amounts of physical memory. The operating system had the ability to allocate contiguous files on disk. Fast code execution was determined by the programmers ability to keep the right variables in register, cache memory, or physical memory, the ability to minimize disk seek time, the bus width, and the processor instruction set. Each language was intended to facilitate a particular problem representation or had some other properties that made it interesting. Each compiler has some sort of translation function, and perhaps an optimization function. In the case of the sieve algorithm, operating without user input, it is theoretically possible for the compiler to recognize that it has all the information necessary to actually execute the program, evaluate the accuracy of the result, and reduce the actual executable to a few print statements and an operating system wait function. Implementing the task with the wrong problem representation can be akin to trying to do precision work while wearing mittens.

[@iEuno1]

All right , I will make a programming stream and upload it on youtube. I mostly do analysis and design.

[@thaddaeusmegow]

Is this video only available in 360p?

[@herauthon]

And where is it tested - on bare metal, VM box, emulator - what HW is used and specs ?

[@Layby2k]

I loved Pascal back in the day, it's been a long time since I did any coding. Is Pascal still used?

[@androth1502]

sadly, not much. i used a high level assembler based on pascal structure for a while about 10 years ago. still do some work on it now as time permits, but it's perpetually stuck in 32bit.

[@stevenbliss989]

@@androth1502 Check you facts!

[@stevenbliss989]

YES, it has transformed into Delphi. Check it out free with open source Lazarus IDE, or the free "Community" edition of commercial Delphi, ....you''ll love it! - both are 32 & 64 bit!So pure Pascal no, but Delphi (a redone object pascal) used by 100k's commercial programmers, and millions of contract programmers. Apart from US, used heavily in UK, South Africa, Russia. Programming taught in high schools using Delphi in South Africa and Russia. M$ keeps trying to deny it, even though Delphi's creator works at M$, where he created C#, which is a mix of Java and Delphi at it's core. Also used in Germany, Italy, China and some other EU countries, but you get the idea.

[@androth1502]

@@stevenbliss989 facts are, there isn't much call for pascal in the commercial industry.

[@WillyChuck]

Wait, when did Pascal become object oriented and gain classes? That's not the Pascal I grew-up with.

[@bwc1976]

Apple used "Clascal" (later renamed Object Pascal) starting in 1983 to develop software for the Lisa and Macintosh, and Borland's Turbo Pascal first added OOP support with version 5.5 in 1989.

[@GHHodges]

Helmet on. Seatbelt fastened. Let’s race!

[@johannesbohm6458]

How so you have a 11h old comment on an 2h old Video??? Wtf

[@GHHodges]

@@johannesbohm6458 I am an admin on Dave’s Garage and I often view them before they get posted. Errr…. I mean…magic!

[@RS-ls7mm]

Um, its not the language, its the compiler. Huge differences even with the same language.

[@simonfarre4907]

Which is why people's conception of C being faster than any of the higher level low lever languages wrong. The reason why C++ and Rust can beat C code in some cases, is because those languages provide guarantees that the C compiler can't, thus will emit better assembly code ultimately.

[@RS-ls7mm]

@@simonfarre4907 I find that slight differences in coding even in the same language has the biggest influence. The differences don't even have to make sense. Its still pretty much trial and error. When you see the absolutely crazy optimized machine code that comes out of a compiler its no wonder it can beat hand written assembly.

[@simonfarre4907]

@@RS-ls7mm I agree with you there. Coding practices matter, if *squeezing* out that extra umph out is required. I just find it strange that people *to this day* believe that C is somehow inherently faster than C++ or Rust, as if somehow C is magic. It's not. Also, the strong(er) type system of C++ and Rust compilers can provide some guarantees that C compilers don't necessarily provide out of the box. Yeah, that's another point I keep seeing "assembly is so much better" - yeah, if you know what you are doing, at *all* times. And nobody (or rather, most people aren't, including myself) is. Sure, if you're cranking out games, which is pump-and-dump kind of development, fine. But maintaining software over time, in purely assembly would be dumb. Which is why nobody does it. Compiler writers (at least the ones who work on the "big" low level ones) are pretty damn smart developers.

[@stevenbliss989]

Totally agree!

[@hqcart1]

The fastest language is obviously Assembly, It's the mother of fastest languages, and you can't be faster than that, if you had different results, then check your assembly code :)

[@surferdude4487]

Assembly is not a true language. You cannot implement the same assembly code on different processors.

[@hqcart1]

@@surferdude4487 Duh, just like he is writing different code for each language, you can write assembly code for each processor architecture.

[@surferdude4487]

@@hqcart1 Since he has not restricted the competition to high level computer languages, I will concede your point. Anyone that can code competently in assembly should be able to beat any compiled or interpreted programming language.

[@hqcart1]

@@surferdude4487 And by the way, he pinned his comment "The current winners are NOT C, C#, C++, or Assembly", so he is using assembly to compete with other languages.

[@Nl-nn3ds]

Here is a problem with this test: are there any real FORTRAN compilers out there? I was porting some FORTRAN code to an open source compiler when something that should have worked did not. After an hour or so searching the manual I found that it was a recognized bug that was not going to be fixed. The reason it was not going to be fixed was that the open source FORTRAN compiler was not real FORTRAN but rather converted the source code to C and used the C compiler to generate the executable. I understand that that is a very common way for Unix boxes to accommodate customers with legacy code. When I first started using C it underperformed FORTRAN by about 6 percent. I would not expect that in a compiler that converts the code to C.

[@VoidloniXaarii]

Thnx!

[@lolaa2200]

Can i make a HW jock ? I'm pretty sure i can make it much faster in VHDL. But yeah it won't exactly execute on x86.

[@wayneholzer4694]

I am no means a expert on any programming language I have played a bit with C/C++/C# Java and python I am about to dip my toes into SQL I am trying to find a language to focus on and get really good and flaunt with while keeping up with technology. I know someone who has worked with SQL for a long time and it has caught my curiosity it is truly amazing at the plethora of programming languages out there to be honest I am not surprised that there is just one universal language used across the board by now but as we know each serves a purpose. Thanks for another informative video.

[@lucidmoses]

I did give it a shot in C. Managed a bit faster but mucking with the way the memory was used but in the end it turned out to only be faster in my VM what I was working in. Wasn't faster in the host computer when I was getting the stats. Tried a few others computers that I had around and got the same results. So I counted it as a fail. I think they difference may have been based on the way the VM pinned large memory blocks but frankly I'm not sure, using non-C memory allocations seemed not in the spirit of the challenge so I didn't investigate further.

[@tednoob]

This content is made for binge watching. People of the future, I envy you.

[@joeysartain6056]

Turbo Pascal on my old Kaypro 2x was my favorite language (other than BASIC)

[@glencmac]

Microcode is the fastest executing language. If you design your code correctly you can interleave as many as 3 or 4 programs. One program is executing while the others are waiting for bus latches to be completed. It is by far the hardest and most time consuming to write and test. Me, if I want fast development I go with C. If I want fast execution I go assembler.

[@crazybeatrice4555]

Was there any HolyC implementations?

[@beofonemind]

This series is a great idea.....

[@peterbrough2461]

What are we programming for - ion traps or superconducting qubits? 😵😉

[@Jankoekepannekoek]

0:19 Haskell is spelled with two l's at the end.

[@fdsKedi]

"And if you are in jail *break out* " WAIT WHAT-