Ruby, Io, PHP, Python, Lua, Java, Perl, Applescript, TCL, ELisp, Javascript, OCaml, Ghostscript, and C Fractal Benchmark
I've always enjoyed fractals, and was curious if scripting languages were up to the task. I wrote a very simple Mandelbrot set generator for my test. Rather than optimizing for each language, I tried to write each program in approximately the same way in each language to make a reasonable performance comparison.
Here are the results from running on my 867 mhz Powerbook G4. Shorter is better. Please note, the following benchmarks are not scientific, and were simply done to satisfy my curiosity. Your mileage may vary.
Feel free to send me ports to any other languages. The program should print the time in seconds that elapsed at the bottom in the form of 'Elapsed %0.2f'. If you can, include instructions for building on MacOS X.
— Erik Wrenholt (erik -at- timestretch.com) 2005-09-20