Surprising (for me) benchmark results...

[E. Mark Ping]

Over on the comp.lang.c++ newsgroup (crossposted to the comp.lang.java
group) there was a challenge to read in a large file, sort the lines
lexigraphically, and write them out to a file.

The argument was that Java was faster than C++.  It turned out that it
was faster, because my implementation of C++ had an available patch
that I hadn't applied.  Anyway, the reults for sorting a 30K line file
(about 4.3MB) were:

Java: ~1500 ms
C++:  ~950 ms
Perl: ~1000 ms

And then, just for kicks I wrote the following python script:


import time

start = time.time()
f = open("infile.txt", 'r')
out = open("outfile.txt", 'w')
l = f.readlines()
l.sort()
out.writelines(l)
f.close()
out.close()
end = time.time()

print (end-start), " seconds"

Python runtime:  600 ms

Pretty cool.  I'm investigating Python as a result of playing around
with Blender, and I'm interested in using python scripting as an
interface for C++ programs (scientific modeling, games, etc.).
This was one impressive result for this Python newbie.
-- 
Mark Ping                     
emarkp at soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU