Originally published in the article A Python Substitute? I Tried Out the Best Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of.
In this experiment I compared speed of execution of a program to print the n-th Fibonacci number.
The goal was to test the speed of Nim against Python and C, with Go being added later.
1. Make sure you have the "languages" installed before you try to run these programs.
- Download Python
- Download Go
- Get Nim
- Download GCC (C Compiler)
2. Compile the files that need to be compiled.
Nim (Original Method - Used in article):
nim c fibonacci.nim
Nim (Suggested Method - Optimized version, suggested to me after the article):
nim c -d:release fibonacci.nim
Go:
go build fibonacci.go -o fib
C:
gcc fibonacci.c
3. Run and time the programs
To time the programs I used the time command in Bash. The first run of each program after system startup should be discarded, and we're interested in the "real" time.
Nim:
time ./fibonacci
Go:
time ./fib
C:
time ./a.out
Python:
time python3 fibonacci.py
After writing the article, it was pointed out to me that by simply passing optimization flags to the Nim compiler I could improve the speed of execution by over 10x. This happens because, as stated in the Official Docs: “By default the Nim compiler generates a large amount of runtime checks aiming for your debugging pleasure. With -d:release some checks are turned off and optimizations are turned on.”
Besides -d:release, there are also other flags that can optimize the runtime even further. Here's a table provided by sschwarzer denoting the different options accepted by the compiler and their impact on runtime:
| Compilation | Runtime in s | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| nim c fibonacci.nim | 3.3 | without any runtime optimization, but faster compilation |
| nim c -d:release fibonacci.nim | 0.56 | with optimization |
| nim c -d:release -d:danger fibonacci.nim | 0.29 | without runtime checks |
| nim c -d:release --gc:arc fibonacci.nim | 0.31 | new memory management approach |
| nim c -d:release -d:danger --gc:arc fibonacci.nim | 0.30 | all combined |