ok-for-scripts.md

Interpreters you can use for CLI tools

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do perl -e ""; done # perl 5.18

real    0m1.319s
user    0m0.020s
sys     0m0.123s

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do lua -e ""; done # lua 5.2

real    0m0.870s
user    0m0.027s
sys     0m0.103s

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do luajit -e ""; done # luajit 2.0

real    0m0.705s
user    0m0.037s
sys     0m0.097s

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do bash -c ""; done # GNU Bash 4.2.45

real    0m2.771s
user    0m0.040s
sys     0m0.130s

Interpreters you shouldn't use for CLI tools if you value time

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do ruby -e ""; done # Ruby 2.0.0

real    0m24.624s
user    0m20.987s
sys     0m2.857s

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do python -c ""; done # Python 3.3.3

real    0m27.074s
user    0m22.947s
sys     0m1.727s

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do python2 -c ""; done # Python 2.7.6

real    0m11.001s
user    0m8.120s
sys     0m1.737s

Cute test!

For my https://github.com/pfalcon/pycopy, whose purpose is exactly to unsuck Python for things like that:

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do pycopy -c ""; done

real	0m0.869s
user	0m0.662s
sys	0m0.261s

That's native Pycopy (again, purposely de-bloated comparing to CPython). Now with more CPython compatibility (imports stuff on startup):

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do pycopy-dev -c ""; done

real	0m2.164s
user	0m1.715s
sys	0m0.519s

@pfalcon That's nice. And yes this gist is from 2013, today things like micropython are viable as well.