This project benchmarks the performance of Perl, Go and Scala with some
basic data processing from a CSV file.
It's not an amazingly-realistic task, but it's vaguely similar to some
of the real-world projects I do, and thus perhaps more comparable than
some of the totally synthetic benchmarks out there.

Read TASK to see what the specification is.

Use make_file.pl to create the source file, ie.
  ./make_file.pl > input.csv

Then for each test, run it with the input file, and pipe the output
somewhere. For example:
  ./go/testread input.csv > output.csv
  (or pipe to /dev/null)


In my testing, I was using
Scala 2.8.0.RC1 on Java 1.6, w/OpenCSV.sf.net
Perl 5.10.1 w/Text::CSV 1.17 and Text::CSV_XS 0.72
Go (May 2010 build)

I received the following results:
With a 100,000 row CSV file, they looked like:
Perl - 1.089 secs
Scala - 1.857 secs
Go - 1.682 secs

With a 1,000,000 row file:
Perl - 10.96 s
Scala - 9.835 s
Go - 16.77 s

With a 10,000,000 row file:
Perl - 111.3 s
Scala - 89.05 s
Go - 154.3 s


I am interested to receive (sensible) optimisations and improvements to the
code, and even implementations in other languages. (I'd love to see some in C,
C++, Ruby and Python, for starters. I'll probably do them myself, eventually.)