Java’s performance is perceived rather differently depending on who you ask ranging from Java-is-faster-than-C to “java is 10x slower”.
Without actually running some benchmarks it’s hard to tell who is actually right and of course every benchmark will show different results and both sides have good arguments. I don’t know of any real world applications that has been ported from C to Java in such a way that statements about their relative performance are valid. So the only source I know are (micro-)benchmarks. Besides the well known Scimark and linkpack benchmarks there are some interesting benchmarks on the “computer language benchmark game” formerly known as the great language shootout. It has often been criticized for too short duration and including warmup times for JITs. Still I like those benchmarks since they are not classic microbenchmarks, but (almost) every benchmark tries to stress a certain set of language features and returns a well defined output.
To make it short: I decided to select four computational intensive, IO-less benchmark from the shootout. Continue reading →