Today, there are about 700 well-known programming languages in the world, while only 250 are used. If a task could be measured in days earlier, it is now a fraction of a second. Here are some of the slowest dynamic typing programming languages.
In electronics, speed and performance depend on the number of transistors that a particular chip can have. According to Moore's law, their number doubles every two years. This is why a modern hand-sized mobile phone is much faster than a room-sized supercomputer of the 90s.
When it comes to computer science, the difference between faster code and a faster PC is quite bike.
Intel and AMD create powerful computing systems in terms of speed. The task of programmers is to write reliable and fast programs.
One of the things to consider when creating software is programming languages. Each of them is implemented in different ways, therefore it has its own merits. And speed may simply not be among them.
If you need to create a program for complex tasks, such as games and heavy mathematical calculations, it is better not to use slow programming languages.
They come in two types:
- with static typing
- with dynamic typing
Statically typed languages are usually compiled, that is, a program called a compiler analyzes and converts all English-language code into an assembler language and creates a new file. This file, in turn, is processed manually by the user.
Languages with dynamic typing are usually interpreted, that is, the software - the interpreter - analyzes and executes the code line by line.
Most tend to languages with dynamic typing, as they are less prone to errors and are easily interpreted by a person, for example, Python. But you have to pay for it at speed.
Perl
Perl is a Unix scripting language. It was created to make it easier for programmers to write long Shell programs. In fact, this is just a set of Shell commands placed in a file.
More importantly, Perl simplified tasks that were considered a nightmare in C and other Unix languages.
Be that as it may, Perl required more speed.
In addition, nowadays it is quite difficult to find a good programmer working for Perl. This is because, unlike Python, for example, Perl is very sensitive to input, and for the program to work, it is necessary that each operator is in the right place.
Even in the most efficient implementations, Perl is still behind competitors. However, language is still evolving and performance issues are being addressed one by one. In 2019, Perl 6 was released, which was called Raku.
PHP
PHP is a scripted programming language used for web development, which usually complements HTML, CSS, and MySQL when deploying websites.
Many claim that PHP is outdated. But it's not.
"PHP is used in 79.0% of all websites whose programming language we know," said the author of the w3techs resource.
In addition, according to a recent StackOverflow survey on programming languages, scripts and markup, it turned out that PHP is quite relevant and surpasses both C++ and Typescript.
However, since PHP requires gradual training and is cheap to accommodate, this affects its performance.
It has low speed due to the fact that this is a language with dynamic typing and it does not have timely compilation (JIT compiler). Fortunately, on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 was released with a performance optimization function: a built-in JIT compiler.
It helped PHP get closer to class programming languages in terms of speed and performance.
Ruby
Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby's official author, known in the Ruby community as Matz, said: "Ruby is created to please programmers."
Ruby is an object-oriented programming language. Everything is interpreted as an object. This made it an elegant and simple tool.
However, in terms of performance, Ruby is an interpreted language. They tend to work slower than the languages that use compilers.
Ruby also consumes a lot of memory and slowly collects garbage.
Python
Universal Python recently took 1st place in the ranking of the most popular programming languages. It is widely used in data processing, web development and cybersecurity.
Despite the impressive advantages, Python also has a significant drawback - speed.
Python and Ruby are from the same family. They are both slow due to GIL and the use of an interpreter. The main difference between these two languages is that the first is focused on data processing, and the second is more suitable for web development.
However, Python is supported by powerful libraries and features. And some of them, such as the Numpy module and the built-in Filter () function, are implemented in C++, which leads to a significant increase in performance. This is why today Python is rapidly developing, ahead of other programming languages.
Speed and performance are important factors that should be considered when implementing software, but they depend not only on the choice of programming language
The main reason for serious speed and performance problems is poor implementation and code design.
While dynamic typing languages are slow, they provide a promising programming experience as well as improved performance.