Writing a regex-based sudoku solver with very little language-dependent code opened the door to benchmarking the various PCRE engines. Without much work, I was able to test perl, ruby, python and python-psyco.

Here are the results, unit is seconds:

                sudre.pl  sudre.rb  sudre.py  sudre.psyco
empty.input     0.012     0.028     0.316     0.240
full.input      0.032     0.076     0.312     0.264
level-1.input1  0.028     0.072     0.328     0.268
level-1.input2  0.028     0.068     0.328     0.268
level-1.input3  0.024     0.052     0.328     0.248
level-1.input4  0.008     0.020     0.316     0.240
level-1.input5  0.008     0.016     0.308     0.236
level-2.input1  0.012     0.016     0.320     0.228
level-2.input2  0.112     0.300     0.400     0.356
level-2.input3  0.172     0.464     0.440     0.412
level-2.input4  0.016     0.048     0.316     0.252
level-2.input5  0.064     0.184     0.340     0.288
level-3.input1  0.212     0.552     0.484     0.424
level-3.input2  0.028     0.072     0.336     0.244
level-3.input3  1.404     3.564     1.428     1.492
level-3.input4  0.072     0.172     0.360     0.296
level-3.input5  3.676     8.725     3.044     3.332
level-4.input1  0.612     1.504     0.840     0.776
level-4.input2  1.580     4.036     1.604     1.736
level-4.input3  0.076     0.220     0.332     0.316
level-4.input4  0.052     0.140     0.352     0.284
level-4.input5  0.076     0.196     0.368     0.292
                -----     -----     -----     -----
          mean  0.377     0.933     0.600     0.568

Some quick observations:

1. Perl is fastest on most of the puzzles, but python is far more consistent. My first guess is that python takes a lot longer to compile the regex, but may execute it faster after it's compiled.
2. Ruby-1.8 (current stable) crashes with a stack overflow trying to compile the regex. Ruby-1.9 was used for this test.
3. It would be interesting to make some graphs out of this... volunteers?

¶ 11:04 AM Tuesday, May 08, 2007 by agriffis