A little while ago I did some testing on the performance of different scripting language and summarized my findings as performance of different scripting languages: shell v. perl v. python v. ruby.
Well, I got some questions about versions and some suggested that the Ruby version I was using was known to be a poor performer. So after I upgraded the box I used for testing to Ubuntu 12.04 I decided to install Ruby 1.9 and re-run the tests.
All the same scripts were used and the results surprised me. Essentially Ruby 1.9 came out on top, with Ruby 1.8 a distant looser.
The other results remained pretty much the same. You can see them here in a Google Docs Spreadsheet: Performance of Scripting Languages v2
For completeness the version numbers are:
- Bash: 4.2.24(1)
- Perl: v5.14.2
- Python: 2.7.3
- Ruby 1.8
- Ruby 1.9
The scripts I ran can be found on launchpad LaunchPad in Revision 3.
Ruby’s improvements are impressive, but my good old Perl has been a bit disappointing. I use a lot of shell these days and it’s good to know that does OK.
\\@matthias