{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/there-is-no-fast-lunch-an-examination-of-the","title":"There is no fast lunch: an examination of the running speed of evolutionary algorithms in several languages","arxiv_id":"1511.01088","date":"2015-11-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Juan-J. Merelo","Pablo García-Sánchez","Mario García-Valdez","Israel Blancas"],"abstract":"It is quite usual when an evolutionary algorithm tool or library uses a\nlanguage other than C, C++, Java or Matlab that a reviewer or the audience\nquestions its usefulness based on the speed of those other languages,\npurportedly slower than the aforementioned ones. Despite speed being not\neverything needed to design a useful evolutionary algorithm application, in\nthis paper we will measure the speed for several very basic evolutionary\nalgorithm operations in several languages which use different virtual machines\nand approaches, and prove that, in fact, there is no big difference in speed\nbetween interpreted and compiled languages, and that in some cases, interpreted\nlanguages such as JavaScript or Python can be faster than compiled languages\nsuch as Scala, making them worthy of use for evolutionary algorithm\nexperimentation.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.01088v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.01088v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"there-is-no-fast-lunch-an-examination-of-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/geneura-papers/2015-ea-languages","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"evolutionary-algorithms","task_name":"Evolutionary Algorithms"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}