Ask HN: Is it true that CoreCLR is that much faster than Mono?

1 point

5 years ago

I am aware of the various published test results where CoreCLR shows fantastic speed-ups compared to Mono, e.g. when calculating MD5 or SHA hash sums.

But my measurements based on the Are-we-fast-yet benchmark suite (see https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet and https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/tree/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet) show a completely different picture. Here the difference between Mono and CoreCLR (both versions 3 and 5) is within +/- 10%, so nothing earth shattering.

Here are my measurement results:

https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet/Are-we-fast-yet_results_linux.pdf comparing the same benchmark on the same machine run under LuaJIT, Mono, Node.js and Crystal.

https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcases/Are-we-fast-yet/Are-we-fast-yet_results_windows.pdf comparing Mono, .Net 4 and CoreCLR 3 and 5 on the same machine.

Here are the assemblies of the Are-we-fast-yet benchmark suite used for the measurements, in case you want to reproduce my results: http://software.rochus-keller.ch/Are-we-fast-yet_CLI_2021-08-28.zip.

I was very surprised by the results. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I measured on x86, or that the benchmark suite in use includes somewhat larger (i.e. more representative) applications than just micro benchmarks.

What are your opinions? Do others have similar results?