MetaBench / SuperBench / HyperBench

A series of benchmarking tools for Mac scripters

In just about any programming language there are many ways to accomplish a given task. The trick is to find the one which executes fastest. I built SuperBench several years ago to compare the execution speeds of two different scripts. It simply runs each script multiple times and displays the total time for completion and notes which script is faster and by what percentage.

When we were migrating a lot of client projects to a cross-platform code base using MetaCard, we ported our tool right along with them, giving us MetaBench. While we were at it, we decided to make one for HyperCard as well (HyperBench), so we could compare execution speeds across tools as well.

MetaBench	SuperBench	HyperBench
(MetaCard)	(SuperCard)	(HyperCard)

All three versions are virtually identical in design and underlying code, providing a useful example of porting techniques as well as an interesting comparison of interpreter speeds.