itch.io

Nice to see you're sticking with your project until the end, you really understand the importance of finishing something you started! Props to you!

I just noticed your attempt to benchmark QB64, and I couldn't hold myself from giving you my two cents on that matter as I worked on developing benchmarking applications for embedded devices for 4 years of my life.

Your loop only has a print command in it, which basically has the same implementation on almost every language, it's a OS interruption basically (interop), so you're not actually measuring the performance of your language but rather measuring the OS interop to print a value. The interop sometimes hold the application until it has completely executed your task, in this case printing a value, so that's why it takes minutes to finish your test.

The simplest but accurate language benchmark I can think of is maybe a MD5 solver for a very long string, or something similar, anything simpler will most likely diverge from the actual purpose of the benchmarking.

Now there's a good overall simple rule to know if a language is fast or slow: How is it converted into machine instructions?

The fastest languages out there are the LLVM compiled languages, like: C, C++, Fortran, Rust and Zig

The slowest are the interpreted languages, like: Ruby on Rails, Python and JavaScript

There are also some languages that are not exactly interpreted, but something like compiled to a intermediate stage just to be translated into machine code, they are like the "half way" between compiled and interpreted languages, like: C#, java and Lua. That's why, although very slow comparing with languages like C++ and Rust, they are still quite fast (mostly what slow them down is a system called garbage collection).

As for QB64(I never used it) but it seems like they can be either compiled (not LLVM though) or interpreted too, so yes it can be very fast, just one step behind languages C++, Rust and Zig.