I wanted to compare risor with tengo, two interesting Go-based scripting languages implemented with a stack-based, bytecode interpreter VM. They both seem fast enough for many scripting uses, the goal is not to discourage use of one or the other - execution speed is but one reason to use a language, and remember that those benchmarks cover tiny specific uses of the language.

Later on I added goja, a Javascript interpreter in Go.

To run the benchmarks on your machine, simply clone the repository and run ./run.bash. You may need to tweak the count_zeds benchmark as it relies on the dictionary file found in "/usr/share/dict/words" on my machine.

Results on my old Lenovo T460 laptop (tengo @c461a7f, risor @b83ab51, August 2024):

$ ./run.bash
count_zeds		tengo: 0m0.253s		risor: 0m0.241s
fib			tengo: 0m3.037s		risor: 0m4.889s
fibt			tengo: 0m0.004s		risor: 0m0.015s
json			tengo: 0m0.008s		risor: 0m0.017s