Sieve benchmarks

After comparing the performance of Run Basic (Beta) and Liberty Basic 4.03 using the Sieve sample program, I wanted to expand the comparison to include a few other languages. I ported the Sieve program as directly as possible. Here are the test results sorted from low to high:

Find primes from 0 to 7000 (10-run average in milliseconds)

Visual Basic 6.0 (0.0)
Run Basic (28.8)
REBOL (35.9)
Runtime Revolution (63.7)
Liberty Basic 3.03 (146.8)
Liberty Basic 4.04 (170.3)

Find primes from 0 to 1000000 (10-run average in milliseconds)

Visual Basic 6.0 (273.5)
Run Basic (4164.4)
REBOL (4767.2)
Runtime Revolution (12421.5)
Liberty Basic 3.03 (20381.1)
Liberty Basic 4.04 (27732.9)

I ran the 0-1000000 benchmark to get VB off of zero milliseconds for a better comparison.

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BASIC turns 50

Well, the BASIC language actually turned 50 on May 1, 2014, and I'm very late to the party. Born at Dartmouth in 1964 (along with the first commercial time sharing), here is the university's tribute page . There is even a great 38 minute documentary that they made for the occasion. 10 PRINT "ENJOY" 20 GOTO 10

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One of the examples on the Run Basic website is a port of Tiny Basic . It's fun to play with and is very much like the interactive, command line Basics found on early personal computers. In fact, I think Tiny Basic was the dialect used on the TRS-80 Model 1. I'm currently working on modifying Tiny Basic to run the Sieve benchmark. Tiny Basic needs two things: profiling and array support . I've already added profiling support for the RUN command. Tiny Basic now displays the running time of a program in milliseconds. The last step is to add array support. Tiny Basic only supports the numeric variables 'a' to 'z'. I'm adding a single array to the environment in order to port the Sieve program. The array will be called a(). I will post the modified Tiny Basic code to the Run Basic Programming Wiki when finished. The whole point of this exercise, however, is to see how fast the Tiny Basic interpreter runs the Sieve benchmark and compare it to the others i...

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