Sieves of Eratosthenes in Many Languages

Implementing the sieve of Eratosthenes in various languages to demonstrate power of GraalVM and Truffle. Please download GraalVM before proceeding with experiments. The code in this repository has been tested to work with GraalVM version 19.3.1.

Ruby Speed

Use following commands to find out that GraalVM Ruby is ten times faster than any other one. The program computes first one hundred thousands of prime numbers using the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm. It repeats the computation in an endless loop to simulate long running process and give GraalVM Ruby time to warm up and optimize.

$ ruby ruby/sieve.rb
$ graalvm/bin/ruby ruby/sieve.rb

MRI Ruby starts fast and then gets slow. GraalVM has long initialization period, but once it is running, it is faster. After few iterations it gets about 10x faster than regular Ruby installed on my Ubuntu. Regular Ruby needs more than 2s to compute the primes. GraalVM Ruby at the end needs less than 150ms on my laptop.

JavaScript

Of course, these days the most optimized dynamic language runtimes are for JavaScript, so shouldn't we rewrite our code to be faster? Yes, we can try that:

$ node js/sieve.js
$ graalvm/bin/node js/sieve.js

We can see that after few warm-up iterations both systems achieve similar peek performance. On my computer one iteration takes around 130ms. That is still faster than GraalVM Ruby, but only a bit (compared to more than 20x to MRI - the standard Ruby implementation). Whether that justifies rewriting whole application from one language to another depends on the actual need for speed. Moreover there are better options...

Spice Ruby with JavaScript

Rather than rewriting whole application into a new language, why not rewrite just the critical parts? Let's keep the computation of natural numbers in Ruby and do the sieve operations in JavaScript:

$ graalvm/bin/polyglot --file ruby+js/sieve.rb --file ruby+js/sieve.js

A combination of languages is hard to compare, as there is no other system that could combine 100% language complete Ruby with 100% language complete JavaScript. There are some transpilers of Ruby to JavaScript, but they are far from complete and clearly they are obsolete - GraalVM can run the mixture of Ruby and JavaScript as fast as optimized JavaScript only version.

Can I add Java?

Those coming from a JavaScript or Ruby camp, interested only in the scripting languages may stop reading now. The rest of us, who write or maintain application in Java maybe asking: Should I rewrite my Java app to get this kind of interop?

No, there is no need! GraalVM is full featured Java VM compatible with the most recent release of Java (you need Maven to proceed), just try:

JAVA_HOME=graalvm mvn -q clean package exec:exec -f ruby+js/fromjava/pom.xml

Again, after few iterations the peak performance of the code is reached, but this time it is embedded into a Java program. You can get all the speed of Truffle from your Java applications, if you execute on top of GraalVM!

Can I use Java Scripting API?

Of course, it is fair to ask whether, in order to use GraalVM one has to learn the special Polyglot API?

If you are only interested in interop between Java and JavaScript, then you don't have to! You can use the standard ScriptEngineManager search for an engine named Graal.js and use it as you are used to. Here is an example:

mvn -f js/fromjava/pom.xml package exec:exec

The command can use regular HotSpot virtual machine and executes the sieve.js script via its integrated JavaScript engine. Btw. the JDK's Nashorn can compute the hundred thousand of prime numbers in 240ms on my computer.

Now run the same script with GraalVM:

JAVA_HOME=graalvm mvn -f js/fromjava/pom.xml package exec:exec

The same Java code, the same JavaScript file - and the performance? Less than 90ms on my computer!

Is R slower than Ruby?

Now imagine you have even slower language than Ruby. Is it possible? Yes, it is. Language like R is even slower and yet very popular (among statisticians). Nice thing is that it works primarily on vectors, so we can generate the list of natural numbers as a simple [2:999999999] expression. Can Graal make that fast?

$ graalvm/bin/polyglot --jvm --file R+js/sieve.R --file R+js/sieve.js

JavaScript is accessing enormously huge vector from R (which is never really created) and the speed is? Great! Within 10-20% of the fastest solution we have seen so far.

Aren't These Scripting Languages Slower than Java?

We have seen that with Truffle almost any language is almost as fast as the fastest implementation of JavaScript. But what about Java? Isn't it supposed to be faster? Yes, it is. Try:

$ mvn -f java/pom.xml install
$ mvn -f java/algorithm/pom.xml exec:java

and you can see that Java is really fast. On my computer it takes something like 100ms to finish one iteration. However we can be even faster! How? Let's just switch to the GraalVM and use it instead of the regular one:

$ mvn -f java/pom.xml install
$ JAVA_HOME=graalvm mvn -f java/algorithm/pom.xml exec:java

One iteration of the sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm now runs in less than 90ms on my computer. GraalVM rules!

But Java cannot Run in a Browser!

That is not entirely true. The Apache HTML+Java API and related projects gives us an easy way to run Java in a browser. Try it:

$ mvn -f java/pom.xml install
$ mvn -f java/client/pom.xml exec:exec -Drepeat=5

The same algorithm written in Java is executed and the result is displayed in an opened browser window. Well, it is not really a browser, it is just an WebView component. But even that can be fixed! Try:

$ mvn -f java/pom.xml install
$ mvn -f java/client-web/pom.xml bck2brwsr:show

and now your Java(!) code runs in real browser. Visit DukeScript project to learn more about using Java in a browser.

And the speed? Amazing, code written in Java and transpilled to JavaScript runs at most 50% slower than Java on classical JVM.

Nothing Compares to C!

A friend of mine once asked: "Nice, but if I write the code in C, then ..., right?" That forced me to sit down and write a C version of the sieve. Indeed it is fast, but it is not really polyglot. Can we fix that?

GraalVM offers a way to interpret the C code with a Truffle interpreter. Interpret C? Isn't that going to be slow? No, not really, if you use Sulong - an LLVM interpreter that is part of GraalVM.

Let's try to compare statically compiled C and Sulong speed:

$ make -C c
$ ./c/sieve
Hundred thousand prime numbers in 103 ms

it starts fast and runs fast. Now it's the Sulong's turn! We need an LLVM bitcode. Get it from clang and then pass it to lli of GraalVM:

$ cd c
sieve/c$ clang -c -emit-llvm *.c
sieve/c$ graalvm/bin/lli --lib natural.bc --lib filter.bc --lib primes.bc main.bc
Hundred thousand prime numbers in 114 ms

The interpreted code isn't as fast as the native one, but it is not slow either. Moreover there is a huge benefit - it can be easily mixed with other languages without any slowdown common when crossing the language boundaries.

Go with a Single File!

The are some good properties of the C solution. No need for virtual machine overhead being one of them. Ability to generate single sieve file that carries all the implementation being another. On the other hand, C isn't really type safe language and also doesn't offer any automatic memory management. Maybe we should try the Go language!? Or:

Can we generate a single, virtual machine less, self-contained file with GraalVM? Yes, we can. There is a native-image command that allows us to compile the java/algorithm project into a self contained binary:

$ JAVA_HOME=graalvm mvn -f java/algorithm -Pnative-image install
/sieve/java/algorithm/target/sieve:8297]      [total]:  36,794.95 ms
$ ls -lh java/algorithm/target/sieve
6,5M java/algorithm/target/sieve
$ java/algorithm/target/sieve
Hundred thousand primes computed in 95 ms

Not only one gets a self contained sieve executable of a reasonable (e.g. 7M) size, but it is also fast and most of all, it doesn't need any warm up. It is consistently fast since begining!

Going Docker!

With a single self contained file created by native-image in previous section, it is easy to join the cloud life style. A simple docker file

FROM alpine:3.6
COPY ./target/sieve /bin/sieve
CMD /bin/sieve

will create small (10MB) docker image with your sieve application. The following commands do it on an Ubuntu Linux AMD64 box:

$ JAVA_HOME=graalvm mvn -f java/algorithm -Pnative-image install
$ docker build java/algorithm/
Step 1/3 : FROM alpine:3.6
Step 2/3 : COPY ./target/sieve /bin/sieve
Step 3/3 : CMD /bin/sieve
Successfully built a06b45ee7d68
$ docker run a06b45ee7d68
$ docker ps
$ docker kill d6ca88781a31

Your effective Java application has just gone to the cloud!

Real Polyglot

Learn to use GraalVM as then you become real polyglot: You'll be able to code in any dynamic language, mix them together and even use Java whenever you want.