NAME

shootout - Computer language shootout.

DESCRIPTION

This is a collection of programming problems which are each solved in several different programming languages. It is useful for comparing implementation code size, understandability and performance.

It was inspired by the now defunct "Great Computer Language Shootout".

The current languages used are: C, C++, Perl, Python (2 and 3), Ruby, Haskell, Matlab (Octave), SBCL (Lisp), Bourne shell (sh), Go, Bourne again shell (bash), Node.js, Awk, and Expect (Tcl).

INDEX

• hello - Hello, World!
• argv - Accessing command line arguments.
• getopt - Parsing options from command line arguments.
• primes - Calculate the first 200 prime numbers.
• missing_numbers - Find missing number among two files.
• revbits - Reverse bits of a binary number.
• revstring - Reverse a string.
• sort - Sort the lines in a file.
• strcomb - Generate all combinations of a "string".
• factorial - Calculate the factorial.
• fibonacci - Find nth Fibonacci number.
• flock - File locking.
• inotify - Watch all the file operations on a file/directory.
• endian - Detect endianess of current system.
• backtrace - Generate a function call backtrace.
• binary_tree - Search of unordered binary trees.
• (www, sockets, web servers)
  • http_request_form - Request a web page with a form.
  • web_server - A simple "Hello, World!" web server.
  • ssh_cmd - ssh to a host and run a command.
  • echo - Echo client/server.
  • https_server - Simple HTTPS server.
  • https_cookie_redirect - Set a cookie, redirect, and check the token.
• count-char - Count the number of characters in a file.
• url-spreadsheet - Generate a spreadsheet with big urls for all OSes.
• rm-dirs - Remove all directories except the n newest.
• template - templates using Mustache, Handlebars, etc

METRICS

There are two main metrics which can be used to gauge a program: speed and code size.

The time command can be used to see how fast a program is.

primes/perl5$ time ./primes.pl
...
real    0m0.019s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m0.000s

primes/python$ time ./primes.py
...
real    0m0.028s
user    0m0.024s
sys     0m0.000s

primes/lisp$ time ./primes.lisp
...
real    0m0.016s
user    0m0.012s
sys     0m0.004s

primes/c$ time ./primes
...
real    0m0.002s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s

In this case Perl was slightly faster than Python. Lisp was slightly faster the Perl and Python. And C was an order of magnitude faster than all of the others.

To measure the code size of a program the wc command can be used.

primes$ wc -l perl5/primes.pl 
23 perl5/primes.pl

primes$ wc -l python/primes.py
19 python/primes.py

primes$ wc -l lisp/primes.lisp
19 lisp/primes.lisp

primes$ wc -l c/primes.c
31 c/primes.c

Here C has the largest code size and Python and Lisp the smallest.

REFERENCES

Python Cookbook by Brian Jones, David Beazley (2013) O'Reilly Media

AUTHOR

Jeremiah Mahler jmmahler@gmail.com
http://github.com/jmahler

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2018, Jeremiah Mahler. All Rights Reserved.
This project is free software and released under the GNU General Public License.