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README_bench.md

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Benchmark Summary

Initial benchmarks

The benchmark results for

  • soep - Sieve of Eratosthenes prime search (byte)
  • soeq - Sieve of Eratosthenes prime search (bit)
  • towh - Tower of Hanoi solver
  • mcpi - Monte Carlo estimate of pi

can be summarized in a single ranking table, each case is sorted by CPU time relative to the Assembler implementation:

soep soeq towh mcpi
asm 1.00 asm 1.00 asm 1.00 asm 1.00
forh 1.47 pas 1.41 gcc 1.84
gcc 1.67 gcc 1.70 gcc 1.64 pas 2.47
jcc 2.27 jcc 2.55 jcc 1.76 forh 2.70
pas 4.71 pas 5.17 forh 1.76 forg 3.25
forg 5.09 forg 3.10 pli 4.89
pli 6.67 pli 19.62 sim 6.49 sim 9.16
sim 7.62 pli 10.62 forw 10.29
a60 10.15 forw 17.17 a60 53.15
forw 21.27 a60 49.48

Some findings:

  • FORTRAN H performs very well, it was certainly the best optimizing compiler available at the time.
  • GCC gives good results, but this compiler is based on decades of additional compiler development, and has also a much larger memory footprint.
  • Pascal, again a 1979 vintage compiler, does very well, especially in the towh and mcpi cases which are very call intensive. Procedure calls are apparently done very efficiently.
  • Algol 60 on the other side performs extremely poorly for towh and mcpi. The reason is that each call uses a GETMAIN/FREEMAIN pair to allocate the new stack frame. Pascal, PL/I, and Simula show that vintage 197x compilers could do much better.
  • PL/I features an optimizer (OPT=2 used), but the performance in soep, which is essentially a simple integer array benchmark, is quite modest compared to FORTRAN H or even G. The poor performance in soeq is caused by the implementation of BIT array access, run-time library calls are used rather than inline code.
  • WATFIV as a non-optimizing fast check-out compiler shouldn't be directly compared, but clearly beats Algol 60 in call intensive benchmarks like mcpi.
  • the towh results for all FORTRANs should be taken with a grain of salt, the implementation emulates recursive calls with a lot of array arithmetic.