I may be enamored of my new programming toy, Kotlin, but I’m not one to go blindly into something like this. While there is a lot to love about the language I was curious how fast it was compared to Java. It’s all running in the same JVM but as I know from Scala, another JVM language, there can be dramatic performance differences. Benchmarking is the usual, and probably clichéd, way of addressing that. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game website is as good a place as any to start. Unfortunately no one has bothered making Kotlin language tests yet. Undaunted I saw this as an opportunity to contribute back as well as get a little extra Kotlin coding in. So, I’ve started a fork to develop and contribute back Kotlin versions. You can follow along and/or contribute to the port at my Gitlab project .
My approach to this endeavor is as follows:
- Update the project drivers and initialization files to get Kotlin running
- Do a straight translation port of the latest version of each of the Java benchmarks
- Compare the performance of the straight-port versions Java
- Create tweaked versions of Kotlin versions to further optimize
- Compare the performance of the tweaked versions to Java
I’ve already completed the first bullet, and the develop branch of my repo. I think the initial two bullets will go relatively quickly. Tweaking and optimizations will be another matter.
PS a big thanks to Sebastian Thiel for setting up a project/repo that is constantly mirroring the Benchmark Games’ CVS repository. It is an indispensable plus to be able to have the latest and greatest automatically (also thanks to Gitlab’s integration capabilities) as development moves forward.