There are currently about 700 known programming languages in the world, with only 250 in use. Where once task times could be measured in days, they are now fractions of seconds. Here are some of the slowest programming languages with dynamic typing.
In electronics, speed and performance depend on the number of transistors a particular chip can have. According to Moore’s law, the number doubles every two years. That’s why today’s hand-sized cell phone is much faster than the room-sized supercomputer of the 1990s.
When it comes to computer science, the difference between a faster code and a faster PC is pretty big.
Intel and AMD build powerful computing systems in terms of speed. The job of programmers is to write robust and fast programs.
One of the things to consider when creating software is programming languages. Each one is implemented differently, so it has its own merits. And speed may simply not be one of them.
If you need to create a program for complex tasks, such as games and heavy math calculations, it’s 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 the English code into assembly language and creates a new file. This file, in turn, is handled 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 lean toward languages with dynamic typing because they are less error-prone and easily interpreted by humans, such as Python. But that comes at a cost of speed.
Perl
Perl is a Unix scripting language. It was created to make it easier for programmers to write long Shell programs. It’s basically just a set of Shell commands placed in a file.
More importantly, Perl has simplified tasks that were considered a nightmare to perform in C and other Unix languages.
Anyway, Perl required more speed.
In addition, it is not easy to find a good Perl programmer these days. That’s because, unlike Python, for example, Perl is very input sensitive, and every statement needs to be in the right place for the program to work.
Even in the most efficient implementations, Perl still lags behind its competitors. Nevertheless, the language is still evolving, and efficiency problems are being solved one by one. The 2019 release of Perl 6, called Raku.
PHP
PHP is a scripting programming language used for Web development that typically complements HTML, CSS and MySQL when deploying Web sites.
Many people argue that PHP is obsolete. But it isn’t.
PHP is used in 79.0% of all Web sites whose programming language we know
In addition, a recent StackOverflow survey on programming languages, scripting and markup found that PHP is quite up-to-date and outperforms both C ++ and Typescript.
However, because PHP requires gradual learning and is cheap to deploy, this affects its performance.
It has low speed because it is a dynamically typed language and lacks timely compilation (JIT compiler). Fortunately, PHP 8 was released on November 26, 2020 with a performance optimization feature: the built-in JIT compiler.
It helped PHP come close to the languages of its class in terms of speed and performance.
Ruby
Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby’s official author and known in the Ruby community as Matz, said: “Ruby is designed to delight 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 be slower compared to languages that use compilers.
Ruby also consumes a lot of memory and is slow to collect garbage.
Python
The versatile Python recently ranked #1 on the list of most popular programming languages. It is widely used in data processing, web development, and cybersecurity.
Despite its impressive advantages, Python also has a significant drawback: speed.
Python and Ruby are from the same family. They are both slow because of GIL and the use of an interpreter. The main difference between the two languages is that the former is focused on data processing and the latter is more suitable for web development.
However, Python is supported by powerful libraries and functions. 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. That’s why Python is growing rapidly these days, ahead of other programming languages.
Speed and performance are important factors to consider when implementing software, but they do not depend only on the choice of programming language
The main cause of serious speed and performance problems is poor implementation and code design.
Although languages with dynamic typing are slow, they provide a promising programming experience as well as improved performance.