Great Computer Language Shootout

Once upon a time, DougBagley? had a burst of crazy curiosity -

• "When I started this project, my goal was to compare all the major scripting languages. Then I started adding in some compiled languages for comparison ... and it's still growing with no end in sight. I'm doing it so that I can learn about new languages, compare them in various (possibly meaningless) ways, and most importantly, have some fun. ... By the way, the word Great in the title refers to quantity, not quality (I will let the reader judge that). "

- which ran out of steam early in 2002

• "Hi, the shootout is an unfinished project. I've decided to discontinue updates to it for now while I work on some other things. Thanks for everyone's help."

The InternetArchive has preserved some snapshots of that project

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/

As a funny sidenote: The shootout page appeared on SlashDot on July 3th, 2001 (much later than on this Wiki, of course). It was quite quickly SlashDotted. Obviously, the administrator of the computer responded by setting the DNS pointing back to slashdot, so all you get on July 4th if you open the page above is a SlashDot page saying that /~doug/shootout/ cannot be found on the server.

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AldoCalpini? ported DougBagley?'s GreatComputerLanguageShootout to Win32 but there have been no updates since 2003.

http://dada.perl.it/shootout/

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2004 saw another revival, this time by BrentFulgham?

• "The project goals have not changed substantially since Doug's original project. This work is continuing so that we all can learn about new languages, compare them in various (possibly meaningless) ways, and most importantly, have some fun!"

http://web.archive.org/web/20040611035744/http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

BrentFulgham? chose to host the project at alioth.debian.org (like sourceforge or savannah but a service for Debian Developers). Sometimes that seemed to confuse people into thinking the GreatComputerLanguageShootout was an integral part of Debian rather than a tiny independent project.

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Although BrentFulgham? started off with those same programs from DougBagley?'s GreatComputerLanguageShootout, new benchmark tasks were created and those DougBagley? programs were replaced during 2005.

I designed the new website and started making performance measurements on my Gentoo Linux Intel® Pentium® 4 computer to show along with the performance measurements Brent made on his Debian Linux AMD™ Sempron™ computer. I took on the day-to-day admin work, and by 2008 Brent had moved on to other projects -- IsaacGouy?

The Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007 once again pushed gun violence into the media headlines. There was no wish to be associated with or to trivialise the slaughter behind the phrase shootout so the project was renamed back on 20th April 2007 -

The ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame.

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CategoryProgrammingLanguage, CategoryMetrics