Just to note, these benchmarks are biased. This is a competition between highly-tuned-to-the-processor Julia with tuned BLAS vs other languages out-of-the-box binaries. Additionally, the benchmarks tests are written inefficiently in the comparison languages. But even then Javascript comes out on top on some benchmark tests.

That's because the jit compiler in the Julia standard library selects the blas for you. As a programmer you don't have to optimize beyond using idiomatic type strategies. You could, say write a galois field type and use the \ solve operator to solve a Reed Solomon Erasure using old fashioned lu decomposition (automatically without pivoting, even), and then turn around and use the same \ operator with floats one line down and it will give you highly optimized blas.

Yes, these benchmarks do tend to be a lightning-rod for controversy. You have two complaints:

1. Yes, some languages do not make it easy to install and link against a well-tuned BLAS. The benchmarks were very recently updated, and you can see the level of effort required to get everything installed and working properly. This was all done in the open on the discourse message board.

2. Yes, the benchmarks involve testing very specific language-level features like iteration, recursion, and IO. And they're testing the ability of specific languages to do these things. Yes, of course in Python you'd look towards a vectorized library call instead of a `for` loop, but then you're not testing Python itself anymore.

How come there are no entries for Julia on the Benchmarks Game? http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ Given Julia's good performance, it is a little strange. :)

Inclusion is by selection of the admin [1,2]. There are Julia implementations available for most of the benchmarks [3] so perhaps eventually they will be included.

[1] https://alioth.debian.org/forum/message.php?msg_id=182495&gr...

[2] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex

[3] https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/master/test/perf/sho...

Interesting! Does that mean the Benchmarks Game is not open for new languages? The faq entry is kind of ambiguous.

It means -- "If you're interested in something not shown on the benchmarks game website then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements."

Like this guy did -- https://pybenchmarks.org/

Only one of the benchmarks is BLAS dependent and the point is to make sure that it is easy to get a tuned BLAS in that system.

If these benchmarks have resulted in all the languages focusing on a fast BLAS, I think that is fantastic.

According to that JavaScript is faster than both Julia and C by a significant margin in iter_mandelbrot ;).

Yup, it's really amazing what millions of hours of development time will do! That benchmark in particular is a little deceiving — and we take those benchmarks very seriously! See this issue for more details: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/24097