[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[John Blomfield]

My presentation "Writing programs for Linux" at last night's monthly 
meeting gave rise to some spirited discussion, when I remarked that 
compiled languages resulted in faster execution times than interpreted 
languages and tended to be preferred by programmers for larger more 
complex problems.  There were many reasons put forward as to why this 
should be and some doubted there was any significant difference in 
practice.  I was unable to answer these questions authoritatively since 
I just use a language when it suits my particular purpose and use the 
rule of thumb "big or fast program = C or C++" and "small and quick to 
write = Python, bash etc."

The attached link is a result of a quick google that tends to support my 
pragmatic view of life:
http://furryland.org/~mikec/bench/

One of the points that was discussed back and forth was the issue of 
startup time for interpreters and where discounting this would change 
the comparison.  Quoting from the above link:

"Note that these tests all include the startup time for the JVM. If you 
are willing to discount startup time and focus on the time spent running 
the benchmark, you can deduct about a second from the Java scores (and 
almost nothing for Pytohn and C++)."


John Blomfield