Ruby 1.9 doesn't smoke Python away!

In his blog entry "Holy Shmoly, Ruby 1.9 smokes Python away!" Antonio proposed following Python benchmarks for calculating first 36 Fibonacci numbers.

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

for i in range(36):
    print "n=%d => %d" % (i, fib(i))

Antonio noticed that on his workstation above code was executed for 31.507s and analog in Ruby 1.9 – 11.934s. On my 4-years old workstation same code took 60.656s, but what time we will see if same 36 Fibonacci numbers with we will find with Python generators?

def fib(n):
    a, b = 0, 1
    i = 0
    while i < n:
        yield (i, a)
        a, b = b, a + b
        i += 1

for i, f in fib(36):
    print "n=%d => %d" % (i, f)

Well, my old workstation shown me for above code 0.078s, so almost in 1000 times faster (and please note 0.078s include time for reading and parsing python source by python interpreter).

As Antonio wrote: Now it’ll be very interesting to run a series of algorithmically equivalent tests for Ruby and Python, and to see just when exactly Ruby 1.9 manages to knock Python out of the water – and where Python has still the edge.

And it's hard to disagree with Antonio, it's really interesting to see where Ruby manages to knock Python out of the water.

P.S. In the memory of Java, which was my favorite language before Python, I made same Fibonacci test on same workstation and it was executed for 0.808s. Not so bad, by the way, but it's so hard code in Java after Python.

class fib {
    public static int fib(int n) {
        if (n == 0 || n == 1)
            return n;
        return (fib(n-1) + fib(n-2));
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        for (int i = 0; i < 36; i++)
            System.out.println("n=" + i + " => " + fib(i));
    }
}