What originally started as an threaded program to generate the Mandelbrot set, an exercise from O'Reilly's Programming Rust turned into a performance comparison of different languages.
To compile: make all
To generate the pictures: make picture
To run the speed comparison: make test
The C program uses libpng and pthreads.
Todo:
- See if
gccsettings can be optimized further - Research Python optimization
- Fail gracefully from bad inputs
- Another language! (Javascript? Java?)
On my Intel i5-6500 (4 CPUs, 4 cores per CPU) the results were as follows:
Clearly Python isn't nearly as good at heavy computation! It does improve with more threads though, which indicates it is using parallel processing.
Rust is ever-so-slightly faster than C, though it may be a compiler optimization issue. Both programs benefit significantly from 4 threads, with diminishing returns thereafter. No speedup after 8 threads.