polybench

Cross-language benchmarks where every runtime is measured inside one dev container, so hardware, kernel, VM and toolchain versions are held constant. Each benchmark lives in its own folder and shares the container image at .devcontainer/.

The goal is not to rank languages. It is to make narrow, well-understood workloads measurable under identical conditions, and to be explicit about what each result does and does not tell you. Every benchmark README carries its own caveats section — read it before quoting a number.

Benchmarks

Benchmark	What it measures	Runtimes
naive-fib/	Unmemoised recursive fib(n) — function call overhead and how far each compiler will restructure recursion	17

The container

One image provides every toolchain used by any benchmark:

AOT	gcc, clang, Rust, Go, GraalVM native-image, .NET NativeAOT
JIT	.NET 10 (C#/F#), Temurin 25 (HotSpot C2), Julia, Node/V8, LuaJIT, PyPy
Interpreted	Lua 5.1, Lua 5.4, CPython

Open the repo in VS Code and run Dev Containers: Reopen in Container, then follow the individual benchmark's README.

To build and run it directly instead:

docker build -t polybench .devcontainer
docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/w" -w /w polybench bash naive-fib/bench/run.sh

Podman users: .devcontainer/devcontainer.json sets --userns=keep-id, which is a Podman flag — Docker rejects it, so remove that runArgs entry if you use Docker. Point VS Code at Podman with "dev.containers.dockerPath": "podman".

The image pulls the .NET SDK, GraalVM, Temurin, Rust, Go, Julia and Node. It is large (~8 GB) and the first build takes a while.

Adding a benchmark

1. Create a folder with a bench/ subdirectory and a README.md covering results, methodology and caveats.
2. Add any missing toolchain to .devcontainer/Dockerfile — the image is shared, so other benchmarks get it too.
3. Add a row to the table above.

Keep the measurement protocol consistent across benchmarks: take sizing parameters from argv so nothing can be constant-folded, run an untimed warm-up phase before timing, and report best alongside mean.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.