New results for Perl vs Scala vs Go vs C

This post revisits the tests from my previous post, measuring how long various languages took to process a file.

After optimisations and suggestions were made from various people, I have some new results, and as before, the tests themselves are available at http://github.com/TJC/PerfTesting

I also have a user-submitted test for doing the test in C, which performed very well, but possibly doesn't perform quite such rigorous CSV parsing as the others.

The results are:

Small file:
Perl 0.744 seconds
Scala 0.842 seconds
Go: 1.55 seconds
C: 0.083 seconds


Medium file:
Perl: 7.12 seconds
Scala: 3.28 seconds
Go: 15.1 seconds
C: 0.780 seconds

Big file:
Perl: 71.2 seconds
Scala: 23.9 seconds
Go: 153 seconds
C: 7.83 seconds

Note the memory sizes:
Scala: 114 MB
Perl: 6 MB
Go: 2 MB
C: 0.5 MB


I find it interesting to note that the Scala code, originally, was taking 115 seconds for the largest file. While I am not a Scala expert, the code was still reasonably straight-forward and not actually *wrong*. However by changing the code around quite a bit, and using a different numeric formatting and output engine, the performance more than quadrupled.


I will welcome any patches for the Go version - I'm sure it must be possible to make it go much faster!