I have seen this suggested before so I decided to check it out on my own PC. I built it myself 11 years ago and it has a Celeron processor. Nothing else was running on the machine at the time. I wrote the C program below and used it to count to 1 billion. It took 12 seconds:
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$ cat prog79.c
#include <stdio.h>
void main(void)
{
double x=0;
long a,b;
for (a=1;a<=10000;a++)
{
for (b=1;b<=100000;b++)
{
x++;
}
}
printf("x = %e ", x);
}
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$ cc -o prog79.o prog79.c
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$ date;./prog79.o;date
Sat Jan 10 18:31:43 GMT 2015
x = 1.000000e+09 Sat Jan 10 18:31:55 GMT 2015
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$
I wrote the same program in Java and it only took 3 seconds so, on the basis of this test at least, Java is not slower than C:
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$ cat prog79.java
public class prog79
{
public static void main (String args[])
{
double x=0;
long a,b;
for (a=1;a<=10000;a++)
{
for (b=1;b<=100000;b++)
{
x++;
}
}
System.out.println("x = " + x);
}
}
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$ javac prog79.java
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$ date;java prog79;date
Sat Jan 10 18:39:00 GMT 2015
x = 1.0E9
Sat Jan 10 18:39:03 GMT 2015
andrew@UBUNTU:~/Java$
