Timing 'Hello, world'

Here's a little unscientific chart showing the compile+run times of a "hello world" program in different languages:

Hello world timings

Bash        <0.4s  ■
C           <0.4s  ■
JavaScript  <0.4s  ■
Lua         <0.4s  ■
PHP         <0.4s  ■
Python      <0.4s  ■
Ruby        <0.4s  ■
Rust         0.5s  ■■
V            0.5s  ■■
R            0.5s  ■■
Swift        0.6s  ■■■
Go           0.6s  ■■■
Haskell      0.8s  ■■■■■
C++          0.9s  ■■■■■■
Zig          1.0s  ■■■■■■■
Elixir       1.2s  ■■■■■■■■■
C#           1.3s  ■■■■■■■■■■
Java         1.7s  ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Odin         1.7s  ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Dart         1.9s  ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Kotlin       8.4s  ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■...■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■

I had to shorten the Kotlin bar a bit to make it fit within 80 characters.

All measurements were done in single-core, containerized sandboxes on an ancient CPU, and the timings include the overhead of docker run. So the exact times aren't very interesting, especially for the top group (Bash to Ruby) — they all took about the same amount of time. But the difference in speed between different compilers is real: for example, Rust is actually faster than C++, C# is faster than Java, and everyone is faster than Kotlin by a large margin.

Here is the program source code in C:

#include <stdio.h>

void greet(const char* name) {
    printf("Hello, %s!\n", name);
}

int main() {
    greet("World");
}

Hello, World!

Other languages: Bash · C# · C++ · Dart · Elixir · Go · Haskell · Java · JavaScript · Kotlin · Lua · Odin · PHP · Python · R · Ruby · Rust · Swift · V · Zig

Of course, this ranking will be different for real-world projects with lots of code and dependencies. Still, it makes a lot of sense for my use case (I run small snippets of untrusted code in one-off dockerized sandboxes), so I decided to share it.

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