JavaFX vs. Scala

Chris Oliver post a nice little performance comparison of JavaFX vs. Groovy and JRuby. He concluded that JavaFX was 25x faster than these other two languages running on the JVM. Of course I had to see how this compared to Scala. First here's the direct translation to Scala I did of the code:

object Tak{
 def tak(x:Int, y:Int,z:Int):Int = if (y >= x) z else tak(tak(x-1, y, z),tak(y-1, z, x),tak(z-1, x, y))
 def main(args:Array[String]) = {
  0 until 1000 foreach ((i) => tak(24,16,8)) 
 }
}

Here are the results for JavaFX on my MacBook:

$ time javafx -server -cp . tak

real 0m12.847s
user 0m11.926s
sys 0m0.338s

So my system is a little slower than Chris Oliver's. That's why I had to run his bench on my MacBook first, to make a fair comparison to the Scala version. Here are those results.

$ time scala Tak

real 0m9.690s
user 0m9.122s
sys 0m0.261s

Scala not only beat out JavaFX on my system, but was also faster than JavaFX running on Chris Oliver's faster system. The guys at Sun should have never let Odersky go!