Maurits thinks aloud

I did some more performance testing, trying to compare C, C# and Java. The test was done using the swirlies calculation as described in one of my previous posts. We already found out that Java was about 4 times as slow as C# which was caused by Java using a more exact calculation of the standard trigonometry functions.

Last night I did the same “benchmark” with the original C code. Result of this unofficial test is that on Linux the C implementation was exactly twice as fast as the C# version, using Mono.

Although I think that two times as fast is still a large difference, this is not a bad result. Firstly because Mono is probably going to become faster in the (near) future so this difference will become smaller. And secondly, it looks that C# is the right choice for writing GIMP plug-ins since this is a lot faster than interpreted plug-ins written in Scheme, Perl, Python or any of the other available languages for GIMP.