langbench is a simplistic set of microbenchmarks designed to see how
well a scripting language performs at basic operations.  The intent is to
have a set of tests that encourage each language team to optimize their
language in a way that would benefit the widest possible set of users.
The version number of this test suite will be 1.0 when there is widespread
agreement that these are the "right" set of benchmarks, much like lmbench
was the "right" set of benchmarks for operating systems.

We (BitKeeper Inc) are using it to benchmark our scripting language, you can
use it for whatever you like.

You may use for langbench any purpose provided that if you use the
"langbench" name you report all results for all languages like so:

langbench version 0.5 results:
lang    cat     grep    hash    loop    proc    sort    split
pl      0.85    0.85    1.38    0.24    0.68    4.72    5.13    
py      0.81    2.97    1.03    0.34    0.40    4.37    1.56    
rb      1.81    1.68    4.18    0.53    1.04    8.00    3.66    
tcl     2.02    1.45    2.44    0.13    0.72    7.48    3.93    
l       2.02    1.48    2.43    0.12    0.73    8.11    3.94    

langbench version 0.6 results (faster cpu accounts for some diffs):
lang    cat     grep    hash    loop    proc    fib     sort    wc
pl      0.37    0.34    0.62    0.11    0.38    4.35    2.02    1.03    
py      0.38    1.99    0.46    0.18    0.21    1.08    1.83    0.48    
rb      0.84    0.81    1.98    0.31    0.59    2.95    3.33    2.33    
tcl     0.75    2.64    1.09    0.07    0.89    2.65    3.46    0.90    
l       0.71    2.03    1.14    0.07    0.29    2.49    3.88    1.54    

with the exception that you may leave off the L language until it is
widely distributed (defined as apt-get install l just works or is 
included with the tcl package).

Note that for the cat, grep, hash, loop, proc, sort benchmarks the number
printed is the microseconds for the implied operation, i.e., for cat,
it is usecs/line, for sort it is the usecs/line to sort and print each
line, etc.

Test descriptions:
	cat	copy stdin to stdout
	grep	match a regular expression against stdin, print each match
	hash	use each line of stdin as a hash key, value is 1.
	loop	measure the cost of a loop
	proc	measure procedure call cost
	sort	sorts stdin to stdout
	split	[Not used because the semantics are different across langs]

Input data is a million lines of code generated like this:

	for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
	do	cat tcl/generic/*.[ch]
	done | head -1000000 > DATA

This file and tests are at http://www.bitkeeper.com/lm/langbench.shar