On average, how efficient is a scripting engine? [closed]

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. Fo开发者_开发问答r help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, visit the help center. Closed 11 years ago.

When dealing with a scripting engine, I'd expect them to be fractions slower than code compiled to assembly. What sort of efficiency numbers are there for major scripting languages (if any)?

Or is this a futile question?

Thanks.

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Go to http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ for actual numbers.

As you can see, languages that are usually compiled (i.e. C, C++, etc.) destroy interpreted languages in terms of performance (both running time and memory).

But the question is odd.

Any scripting language can be made compilable into native code (i.e. assembly) and vice versa (e.g. HipHop: PHP to C++ compiler).

And language aside, some compilers are much better than others because they know how to optimize the code to run faster natively. And they also differ between single-core and multi-core systems.

So if I can take a guess... if you're making a decision on what language to use based on performance (especially... ESPECIALLY if you're talking about scripting languages), you're probably making a mistake. There are many more considerations beyond performance that impact on selection of a programming language for a project.

If I guessed wrong, sorry!