An empirical comparison of.pdf

D R A FT An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a search/string-processing program Lutz Prechelt (prechelt@ira.uka.de) Fakulta?t fu?r Informatik Universita?t Karlsruhe D-76128 Karlsruhe, Germany +49/721/608-4068, Fax: +49/721/608-7343 http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/EIR/ Technical Report 2000-!!! February 29, 2000 Abstract 80 implementations of the same set of requirements, created by 74 different programmers in vari- ous languages, are compared for several properties, such as run time, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of effort required for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given programming problem, “scripting languages” (Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than conventional languages. In terms of run time and memory consumption, they often turn out better than Java and not much worse than C or C++. In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language. D R A FT 2 CONTENTS Contents 1 On language comparisons 3 2 Origin of the programs 3 2.1 Non-script group: C, C++, Java . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Script group: Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3 Validity: Are these programs comparable? 4 3.1 Programmer capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.2 Work time reporting accuracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.3 Different task and different work conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.4 Handling a misunderstood requirement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.5 Other minor problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .