There are many disadvantages to being a balding geezer. In
compensation, if you've managed to survive the second half of
the twentieth century and been involved in computing, there's bearing
personal witness to what happens when a
technological transition goes into full-tilt
exponential blow-off mode. I'm talking about Moore's Law—computing
power available at constant cost doubling every 18 months or so. When
Moore's Law is directly wired to your career and bank account,
it's nice to have a little thermometer you can use to see how it's
going as the years roll by. This page links to two benchmarks I've
used to evaluate computer performance ever since 1980. They focus on
things which matter dearly to me—floating point computation speed,
evaluation of trigonometric functions, and matrix algebra. If you're
interested in text searching or database retrieval speed, you should
run screaming from these benchmarks. Hey, they work for me.
New September 2021 updates adds Raku (Perl 6) to the C,
C++, Chapel, Ada, Algol 60/68, COBOL, Common Lisp, Erlang,
Forth, FORTRAN, FreeBASIC, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Julia,
Lua, Mathematica, Mbasic, Modula2, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PL/I,
Prolog, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Simula, Smalltalk, Swift, and
Visual Basic (6 and .NET) language implementations of the
floating point benchmark, and includes a comparison of the
relative performance of these languages.