Benchmark Results

Benchmark Times

Here are some speed comparisons of Misty Beach Forth versus some other Forth implementations. Note that Misty Beach Forth has several reported times because I ran it under several environments. The best result is running under Symantec Cafe 1.51 with version 2.00b19 of their JIT. Using this environment, Misty Beach Forth is as fast as the native x86 Jax Forth.

Obviously, this is a far from complete benchmark of Forth implementation performance. I have some pointers to better benchmarks, but haven't downloaded and run them yet. As I find and run better benchmarks, I'll add them here. If you know of any, I'd appreciate an e-mail.

Forth Implementation	Time in seconds
Misty Beach Forth V0.21⁽¹⁾	207
Misty Beach Forth V0.21⁽²⁾	181
Misty Beach Forth V0.21⁽³⁾	172
Jax Forth V1.25⁽⁴⁾	144
Misty Beach Forth V0.21⁽⁵⁾	143
Win32Forth V3.2⁽⁶⁾	60
LMI Forth V1.01 ⁽⁶⁾	26

Benchmark Code

I'm using a variation of a benchmark posted by Bernie Mentink. See F21 and F*F by Jeff Fox for a discussion and results from other Forths. Note that the original benchmark only loops to 1000 in both loops, so the numbers reported by Jeff Fox must be multiplied by 100 to compare them to these.

    : INNER 10000 0 DO 34 DROP LOOP ;
    : BENCH 10000 0 DO INNER LOOP ;
    BENCH

Footnotes

Running Netscape Navigator 3.01 on a Pentium-90 with 32 MB RAM running Windows-NT 4.00.
This version on Netscape comes with a JIT compiler for Java applets.
Running Symantec Cafe 1.51 with JIT V1.02e on a Pentium-90 with 32 MB RAM running Windows-NT 4.00.
Running Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01 with one patch on a Pentium-90 with 32 MB RAM running Windows-NT 4.00.
This version of Internet Explorer comes with a JIT compiler. The patch is available at http://www.microsoft.com/java and fixes some known bugs that were preventing Misty Beach Forth from running.
Jax4th for Windows-NT Revision 1.25 on a Pentium-90 with 32 MB RAM running Windows-NT 4.00.
Jax4th is a GNU copylefted 32-bit Forth by Jack J Woehr. Jack provides the following comment:
Jax4th is not an optimizing compiler targeted at professional development. The author did not dream of providing in two hundred (200) hours of his time a freeware Forth to compete with professional systems which required thousands of hours of programmer time to complete.
Running Symantec Cafe 1.51 with JIT V2.00b19 on a Pentium-90 with 32 MB RAM running Windows-NT 4.00.
Win32Forth V3.2 build 0819 built July 26th 1996 running on a Pentium-90 with 32 MB RAM running Windows-NT 4.00.
Win32Forth is a public domain 32-bit Forth by Andrew McKewan, Tom Zimmer, Jim Schneider, Robert Smith, Y.T. Lin and Andy Korsak.
LMI Forth for Windows 1.01 on a Pentium-90 with 32 MB RAM running Windows-NT 4.00.
LMI Forth is a commercial 16-bit Forth by Laboratory Microsystems Inc.