2007 Research Fair - Computer Science Abstracts

An Analysis of Compiled Versus Interpreted Programming Languages
by Jacob Kruse
(Faculty Sponsor:  Greg Gagne)

Programming Languages often trade complexity for ease of development, but at what cost? How much of an impact do newer programming languages have on performance and resource usage? How much is lost by trading performance for ease of development? This impact is measured via test cases exploring the performance and resource usage of Java, Perl, PHP, and C in a variety of tests that emphasize different aspects of performance and resource usage. Testing showed that each language paid a significant performance penalty in terms of both CPU Usage and Memory usage in at least one of the test cases. While Java, Perl, and PHP all seek to simplify software development, each still pays a significant penalty such that it still cannot completely replace languages such as C and assembly language.