Computer Language Effciency via Data Envelopment Analysis.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Operations Research Volume 2011, Article ID 154516, 14 pages doi:10.1155/2011/154516 Research Article Computer Language Effciency via Data Envelopment Analysis Andrea Ellero and Paola Pellegrini Department of Management, Universita Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Cannaregio 873, 30121 Venezia, Italy ` Correspondence should be addressed to Andrea Ellero, ellero@unive.it Received 8 April 2011; Revised 9 September 2011; Accepted 9 September 2011 Academic Editor: Ching-Jong Liao Copyright q 2011 A. Ellero and P. Pellegrini. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The selection of the computer language to adopt is usually driven by intuition and expertise, since it is very diffcult to compare languages taking into account all their characteristics. In this paper, we analyze the effciency of programming languages through Data Envelopment Analysis. We collected the input data from The Computer Language Benchmarks Game: we consider a large set of languages in terms of computational time, memory usage, and source code size. Various benchmark problems are tackled. We analyze the results first of all considering programming languages individually. Then, we evaluate families of them sharing some characteristics, for example, being compiled or interpreted. 1. Introduction Which programming language is the best one? In general, the answer could be “no guess,” of course. But if we add a precise criterion, asking, for example, for a program with low memory consumption, one would probably