Tangentially related, some months ago I started a benchmarking project for 8-bit home micro BASIC systems, calculating prime numbers by trial division (the goal was not to have an efficient way of finding prime numbers, but to have some consistent unit of work that could be expressed simply and therefore be implementable regardless of limitations in any particular system's BASIC).
At some point I thought I'd try my hand at an APL version to compare the speeds of BASIC and APL in my IBM 5100, and the project started spiraling out of control from there.
ZBasic, Dartmouth True BASIC (on the Macintosh), various Microsoft BASICs, even Atari 2600 BASIC are all represented (that last one was a challenging port).
It's pretty clear to see that Microsoft BASICs were all pretty slow, that Woz's Integer BASIC is pretty tidy, and Acorn's BBC BASIC is a masterwork.
I still have a few more language ports up my sleeves in various unfinished stages, a structural mistake in the DRI Personal BASIC version (which has also snuck into a couple other ports) that causes it to do more work after finding the last prime, which I need to correct both in the source and the published results, and a long list of results to gather using software and hardware I've already collected with ports I've already written.
Mostly the micro results are in the bottom half.
http://www.typewritten.org/Articles/...ks/primes.html
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