Java "Hello, World!" 6x slower than Python

Yup. I know, micro-benchmarks, but I find this one quite interesting. Take two small programs, one Java, one Python:

package com.test; public class TestJava { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { System.out.println("Hello, World!"); } } print "Hello, World!"

Running these two through time clearly shows that Java is 6 (six) times slower:

[felix@the-machine bin]$ time java com.test.TestJava Hello, World! real 0m0.142s user 0m0.080s sys 0m0.017s [felix@the-machine bin]$ time java com.test.TestJava Hello, World! real 0m0.142s user 0m0.077s sys 0m0.020s [felix@the-machine bin]$ time java com.test.TestJava Hello, World! real 0m0.154s user 0m0.070s sys 0m0.023s [felix@the-machine python]$ time python test.py Hello, World! real 0m0.024s user 0m0.013s sys 0m0.007s [felix@the-machine python]$ time python test.py Hello, World! real 0m0.025s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.003s [felix@the-machine python]$ time python test.py Hello, World! real 0m0.026s user 0m0.013s sys 0m0.007s

Not only is Java slower, it's also a lot more code. And I'm not only talking about lines of code here (which, still, are 6 times more; really it's 1 line of Python and 6 of Java -- if you remove the whitespace), but compiled code, too. Look:

[felix@the-machine bin]$ ls -lh com/test/TestJava.class -rw-r--r-- 1 felix felix 595 Jun 1 21:50 com/test/TestJava.class [felix@the-machine python]$ ls -lh test.pyc -rw-r--r-- 1 felix felix 117 Jun 1 21:59 test.pyc

The compiled Java code is 595 bytes, while the compiled Python code is 117 bytes. Five times bigger. Say it with me: Java == BLOAT !