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Asked: 2026-05-15T13:29:06+00:00

I’m trying to figure out the best programming language for an analytical model I’m

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I’m trying to figure out the best programming language for an analytical model I’m building. Primary consideration is speed at which it will run FOR loops.

Some detail:

  • The model needs to perform numerous (~30 per entry, over 12 cycles) operations on a set of elements from an array — there are ~300k rows, and ~150 columns in the array. Most of these operations are logical in nature, e.g., if place(i) = 1, then j(i) = 2.
  • I’ve built an earlier version of this model using Octave — to run it takes ~55 hours on an Amazon EC2 m2.xlarge instance (and it uses ~10 GB of memory, but I’m perfectly happy to throw more memory at it). Octave/Matlab won’t do elementwise logical operations, so a large number of for loops are needed — I’m relatively certain that I’ve vectorized as much as possible — the loops that remain are necessary. I’ve gotten octave-multicore to work with this code, which makes some improvement (~30% speed reduction when I get it running on 8 EC2 cores), but ends up being unstable with file locking, etc.
    +I’m really looking for a step change in run-time — I know that actually using Matlab might get me as much as a 50% improvement from looking at some benchmarks, but that is cost-prohibitive. The original plan when starting this was to actually run a Monte Carlo with this, but at 55 hours a run, that’s completely impractical.
  • The next version of this is going to be a complete rebuild from the ground up (for IP reasons I won’t get in to if nothing else), so I’m completely open to any programming language. I’m most familiar with Octave/Matlab, but have dabbled in R, C, C++, Java. I’m also proficient w/ SQL if the solution involves storing the data in a database. I’ll learn any language for this — these aren’t complicated functionality we’re looking for, no interfacing with other programs, etc., so not too concerned about learning curve.

So with all that said, what’s the fastest programming language specifically for FOR loops? From a search of SO and Google, Fortran and C bubble to the top, but looking for some more advice before diving in to one or the other.

Thanks!

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  1. Editorial Team

    In terms of absolute speed, probably Fortran followed by C, followed by C++. In practical application, well written code in any of the three, compiled with a descent compiler should be plenty fast.

    Edit- generally you are going to see much better performance with any kind of looped or forking (e.g.- if statements) code with a compiled language, versus an interpreted language.

    To give an example, on a recent project I was working on, the data sizes and operations were about 3/4 the size of what you’re talking about here, but like your code, had very little room for vectorization, and required significant looping. After converting the code from matlab to C++, runtimes went from 16-18 hours, down to around 25 minutes.

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