5 ms·

Scripting Language Startup Overhead

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
I don't remember where I saw the inspiration for that, but I greatly extended the idea at some point. After a small cleanup today, I thought it could bring some good discussion. Here are the raw numbers: Interpreter Syscall count Real time (s; x100) User time Kernel time Max resident memory (KB) bash 5.2.37 156 0.07 0.03 0.04 3596 busybox ash 1.36.1 35 0.02 0.01 0.01 1556 dash 0.5.12 33 0.02 0.01 0.00 1556 ksh PD KSH v5.2.14 88 0.05 0.03 0.02 2376 mksh R59 75 0.04 0.02 0.01 1824 yash 2.57 93 0.05 0.03 0.02 3132 zsh 5.9 274 0.08 0.04 0.03 3792 busybox awk 1.36.1 19 0.02 0.01 0.01 1556 mawk 1.3.4_20240905 58 0.04 0.02 0.01 2444 gawk 5.3.1 103 0.06 0.03 0.03 3568 nawk 20230909 58 0.04 0.02 0.01 2592 python 2.7.18 629 0.45 0.31 0.13 6484 python 3.12.8 389 0.74 0.56 0.18 9636 perl 5.40 175 0.08 0.02 0.06 5088 raku v2024.10 657 15.40 14.49 4.07 148148 tclsh 8.6 140 0.15 0.09 0.06 5164 jimtcl 0.83 109 0.12 0.05 0.06 4052 lua 5.1.5 83 0.06 0.03 0.03 2624 lua 5.3.6 83 0.06 0.03 0.02 2620 lua 5.4.6 83 0.06 0.03 0.02 2644 luajit 2.1.1716656478 76 0.05 0.03 0.02 2680 nodejs v22.4.1 743 1.65 1.14 0.52 40664 chez scheme 10.0.0 350 3.70 2.28 1.42 47568 petite chez scheme 10.0.0 304 2.30 1.42 0.87 31056 gauche 0.9.15 2530 3.43 9.52 1.11 25228 stklos 2.00 280 2.78 2.53 0.25 12368 guile 3.0.10 1512 1.50 2.02 0.67 16148 guile 3.0.10 (compiler) 3718 5.28 7.55 1.50 33728 ecl 23.9.9 3286 3.61 5.09 0.91 12268 sbcl 2.4.11 241 0.24 0.06 0.18 19008 clisp 2.49.92 399 0.48 0.20 0.25 9556 ccl 1.13 293 0.36 0.11 0.21 16456
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
(if anyone knows what's up with raku, I'm all ears, because this is a disaster)
- lizmat 2y ago
  Startup time is not the strong point of Rakudo. And it will be a long time before it will. Beyond startup, performance definitely has attention of the core developers: that's when hot code gets inlined, and JITted to machine code if you're on Intel hardware. But before that, currently not so much. The best possible startup time that could potentially be reached in the current implementation of Rakudo, is the bare startup time of NQP in which Rakudo is basically implemented. Compare NQP on an Intel 2.4 GHz i9 on MacOS: % time nqp -e '' real 0.04s user 0.03s sys 0.01s with: % time rakudo -e '' real 0.15s user 0.15s sys 0.03s With NQP taking about 16MB of memory. Raku as a language is selected for its features, its community and possibly for its promise. Whether that is a disaster or not, is up to the user. Finally, if you want fast startup, don't use a scripting language.
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    >Finally, if you want fast startup, don't use a scripting language. Huh? Isn't startup speed one of the points of simpler, less optimized interpretation strategies? I mean, unless you compare it to AOT compilation, which is another story. Those numbers show that Perl and Tcl, both "full featured" scripting languages, don't have the least issue on the matter. I'm not the kind to freely rain on parades, especially when Raku is already not a popularity king, but I don't think my use of the word "disaster" was unfounded, even if not "very nice".
    - lizmat 2y ago
      > those numbers show that Perl and Tcl, both "full featured" scripting languages, don't have the least issue on the matter. Anybody using modern Perl will most likely also use Moose, and probably big integers as well. If you compare startup times with Perl / Moose / big integers with Rakudo (on the same Intel hardware as before): % time perl -MMoose -Mbigint -e '' real 0.20s user 0.14s sys 0.02s % time rakudo -e '' real 0.16s user 0.15s sys 0.04s And suddenly, Raku starts up faster than Perl! Because Raku comes with a Moose like object system and big integers out of the box, it doesn't need to do anything special to give you those features. So in a way, you're comparing apples with oranges when you're just comparing bare startup times. Because you are not considering the feature set you get with a bare startup. So your remark was definitely NOT very nice.
frou_dh 2y ago
Nice job. I'd like to add that surprisingly OCaml can be considered a Unix scripting language because it supports both #! shebang scripts and one-shot evaluations e.g. `ocaml -e 'print_endline "hello"'`. In these modes it uses bytecode rather than native compilation.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  That is interesting because I thought OCaml only had a native compiler.

I don't remember where I saw the inspiration for that, but I greatly extended the idea at some point. After a small cleanup today, I thought it could bring some good discussion. Here are the raw numbers: Interpreter Syscall count Real time (s; x100) User time Kernel time Max resident memory (KB) bash 5.2.37 156 0.07 0.03 0.04 3596 busybox ash 1.36.1 35 0.02 0.01 0.01 1556 dash 0.5.12 33 0.02 0.01 0.00 1556 ksh PD KSH v5.2.14 88 0.05 0.03 0.02 2376 mksh R59 75 0.04 0.02 0.01 1824 yash 2.57 93 0.05 0.03 0.02 3132 zsh 5.9 274 0.08 0.04 0.03 3792 busybox awk 1.36.1 19 0.02 0.01 0.01 1556 mawk 1.3.4_20240905 58 0.04 0.02 0.01 2444 gawk 5.3.1 103 0.06 0.03 0.03 3568 nawk 20230909 58 0.04 0.02 0.01 2592 python 2.7.18 629 0.45 0.31 0.13 6484 python 3.12.8 389 0.74 0.56 0.18 9636 perl 5.40 175 0.08 0.02 0.06 5088 raku v2024.10 657 15.40 14.49 4.07 148148 tclsh 8.6 140 0.15 0.09 0.06 5164 jimtcl 0.83 109 0.12 0.05 0.06 4052 lua 5.1.5 83 0.06 0.03 0.03 2624 lua 5.3.6 83 0.06 0.03 0.02 2620 lua 5.4.6 83 0.06 0.03 0.02 2644 luajit 2.1.1716656478 76 0.05 0.03 0.02 2680 nodejs v22.4.1 743 1.65 1.14 0.52 40664 chez scheme 10.0.0 350 3.70 2.28 1.42 47568 petite chez scheme 10.0.0 304 2.30 1.42 0.87 31056 gauche 0.9.15 2530 3.43 9.52 1.11 25228 stklos 2.00 280 2.78 2.53 0.25 12368 guile 3.0.10 1512 1.50 2.02 0.67 16148 guile 3.0.10 (compiler) 3718 5.28 7.55 1.50 33728 ecl 23.9.9 3286 3.61 5.09 0.91 12268 sbcl 2.4.11 241 0.24 0.06 0.18 19008 clisp 2.49.92 399 0.48 0.20 0.25 9556 ccl 1.13 293 0.36 0.11 0.21 16456

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

(if anyone knows what's up with raku, I'm all ears, because this is a disaster)

lizmat 2y ago
Startup time is not the strong point of Rakudo. And it will be a long time before it will. Beyond startup, performance definitely has attention of the core developers: that's when hot code gets inlined, and JITted to machine code if you're on Intel hardware. But before that, currently not so much. The best possible startup time that could potentially be reached in the current implementation of Rakudo, is the bare startup time of NQP in which Rakudo is basically implemented. Compare NQP on an Intel 2.4 GHz i9 on MacOS: % time nqp -e '' real 0.04s user 0.03s sys 0.01s with: % time rakudo -e '' real 0.15s user 0.15s sys 0.03s With NQP taking about 16MB of memory. Raku as a language is selected for its features, its community and possibly for its promise. Whether that is a disaster or not, is up to the user. Finally, if you want fast startup, don't use a scripting language.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  >Finally, if you want fast startup, don't use a scripting language. Huh? Isn't startup speed one of the points of simpler, less optimized interpretation strategies? I mean, unless you compare it to AOT compilation, which is another story. Those numbers show that Perl and Tcl, both "full featured" scripting languages, don't have the least issue on the matter. I'm not the kind to freely rain on parades, especially when Raku is already not a popularity king, but I don't think my use of the word "disaster" was unfounded, even if not "very nice".
  - lizmat 2y ago
    > those numbers show that Perl and Tcl, both "full featured" scripting languages, don't have the least issue on the matter. Anybody using modern Perl will most likely also use Moose, and probably big integers as well. If you compare startup times with Perl / Moose / big integers with Rakudo (on the same Intel hardware as before): % time perl -MMoose -Mbigint -e '' real 0.20s user 0.14s sys 0.02s % time rakudo -e '' real 0.16s user 0.15s sys 0.04s And suddenly, Raku starts up faster than Perl! Because Raku comes with a Moose like object system and big integers out of the box, it doesn't need to do anything special to give you those features. So in a way, you're comparing apples with oranges when you're just comparing bare startup times. Because you are not considering the feature set you get with a bare startup. So your remark was definitely NOT very nice.

frou_dh 2y ago

Nice job. I'd like to add that surprisingly OCaml can be considered a Unix scripting language because it supports both #! shebang scripts and one-shot evaluations e.g. `ocaml -e 'print_endline "hello"'`. In these modes it uses bytecode rather than native compilation.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
That is interesting because I thought OCaml only had a native compiler.