Question

Assuming I wrote a program in two different languages and I need to compare the performance,
what aspects should I focus on other than comparing their running time?

Answer 1

You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Really the question is do you want to use a low level language (faster) or high level language (slower). A high level language is going to do many things for you and it will also make certain assumptions which will make it slower. With a high level language you are going through multiple layers of abstraction and therefore it is going to be naturally slower. If you want top performance, use c++. If you want something even faster use assembly language. A high level language like c# or java is going to be more convenient as a lot of the underlining plumbing is handled for you, but with that comes a performance decrease. Again this comes with certain assumptions that are made and extra code that is executed that might not pertain specifically to what you are trying to accomplish.

If you want to test the performance of different language pick functions that might require the language or platform to handle many of the underlining functions for you. Also lower level language tend to give you direct access to hardware, allowing you to tweak how you interact with it. Gaming engines and other items that require top performance are typically written in c++ vs a language like Visual Basic because of the amount of control and the increased performance of using unmanaged code. I would focus first on categories like (graphics, etc.) that you would need increase performance for and then pick some tests from there. I’m also sure you can find existing tests already posted on the internet that compare language performance.