In a previous post I took a look at benchmarking the performance of various programming languages using recursive Fibonacci. Today I decided to take a look at Vala.

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

First, of course, I had to install Vala and a suitable IDE. To do this on Ubuntu 10.04, I followed the instructions found here.

Here is the code and the benchmark result:

public class Main
{

  public static int Fibonacci(int n)
  {
    if (n < 2)
    {
      return n;
    }
    else
    {
      return Fibonacci(n - 1) + Fibonacci(n - 2);
    }
  }

  public static int main (string[] args)
  {
    var timer = new Timer();
    timer.start();
    for (int  i = 0; i < 36; i++)
    {
      stdout.printf("n=%d => %d\n", i, Fibonacci(i));
    }
    timer.stop();
    stdout.printf("Time elapsed = %f seconds\n", timer.elapsed());
    return 0;
  }
}

Results: Time elapsed = 0.640000 seconds

As you can see, compared to the recursive python benchmark (Time elapsed =  14.2846501707 seconds), this is very fast.

Vala looks like a very interesting language and is one I’ll be watching the progress of closely.

Please note: I’m not a C coder and have never programmed in either C or Vala before, as such, my timing routine is probably poorly implemented at best! If anyone knows how I should have done this, I’d love to hear from you.

Many thanks to frederik (see comments below) for showing me a better way of determining elapsed time!