Oak performance I: Fibonacci faster

← Posts 11 Mar 2022

I'm in a benchmarking mood today. So I implemented a (naive, not-memoized) Fibonacci function in both Oak and Python (the language it's probably most comparable to in performance) and ran them through some measurements. This post is a pretty casual look at how they both did.

Here's the Oak version of the program. I call print() directly here to avoid any overhead of importing the standard library on every run of the program (though it's probably within the margin of error). I picked the number 34 sort of by trial-and-error, to make sure it was small enough for me to run the benchmarks many times but big enough that the program ran long enough to allow for consistent measurements.

fn fib(n) if n {
    0, 1 -> 1
    _ -> fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)
}

print(string(fib(34)) + '\n')

Here's the same program in Python, which I ran with Python 3.9.10 on my MacBook Pro. It's almost a direct port of the Oak program.

def fib(n):
    if n == 0 or n == 1:
        return 1
    else:
        return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)

print(fib(34))

I also made a Node.js version compiled from the Oak implementation, with oak build --entry fib.oak -o out.js --web.

I measured 10 runs of each program with the magic of Hyperfine. Here's the (abbreviated) output:

Benchmark 1: node out.js
  Time (mean ± σ):     259.4 ms ±   1.9 ms    [User: 252.6 ms, System: 11.7 ms]

Benchmark 2: python3 fib.py
  Time (mean ± σ):      2.441 s ±  0.042 s    [User: 2.421 s, System: 0.011 s]

Benchmark 3: oak fib.oak
  Time (mean ± σ):     13.536 s ±  0.047 s    [User: 14.767 s, System: 0.729 s]

Summary
  'node out.js' ran
    9.41 ± 0.18 times faster than 'python3 fib.py'
   52.19 ± 0.43 times faster than 'oak fib.oak'

The gap between Python and native Oak isn't too surprising -- Oak is generally 4-5 times slower than Python on numerical code, so this looks right. But I was quite surprised to see just how much faster the Node.js version ran. V8 is very, very good at optimizing simple number-crunching code, and it shows clearly here.